Contract Description: The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP, 2003-017-00) is an ongoing collaborative effort to design, test, implement and evaluate Status and Trends Monitoring for salmon and steelhead populations and their habitat, and watershed-scale Effectiveness Monitoring for management actions impacting salmon and steelhead populations and habitat in the Interior Columbia River Basin.

ISEMP explicitly addresses work requirements of many 2008 FCRPS Biological Opinion RPAs (56.1, 56.2, 56.3, 57.1, 57.2, 57.3, 57.4, 57.5) and is directly related to additional 2008 FCRPS Biological Opinion implementation strategy requirements and recommendations. ISEMP takes a pilot-project approach to the research and development of monitoring by implementing experimental programs in several major subbasins of the Interior Columbia: the Wenatchee, Entiat, Methow, John Day, South Fork Salmon and Lemhi River basins. The overall goal of the project is to provide regional salmon management agencies with the data, information and tools necessary to design efficient and effective monitoring programs.

Specifically, ISEMP generates quantitative guidance on and examples of: the robustness and limitations of population and habitat monitoring protocols, indicators and metrics; sampling design approaches for the distribution of monitoring effort in time and space; analytical approaches to the evaluation of monitoring data, information and programs; effective data management and communication designs that support the use, standardization and compilation of implementation, compliance, status, trends and effectiveness monitoring data by regional data generators and decision makers; and finally the design and implementation of watershed-scale restoration actions to maximize both the biological impact and associated learning opportunities resulting from the design and implementation strategy.

Through its work to date, ISEMP has developed expertise in the coordination and implementation of large-scale monitoring data collection programs. Applying this experience, ISEMP coordinates the installation, maintenance and calibration of in-stream PIT tag arrays across the Snake River basin and is designing and coordinating the implementation of a Columbia River basin-wide stream habitat status and trends monitoring. These programmatic implementation facets of ISEMP leverage previous experience with logistics and social factors to effectively implement comprehensive, standardized monitoring research and development at an unprecedented scale.  

This contract is one of several contracts that will implement this project.  Each contract is responsible for an end of contract progress report.  Additionally, a project level "synthesis report" will also be produced under this project and data and analysis from this contract will be utilized in the production of that project level report.  The synthesis report is a deliverable under the TerraQua contract (not this contract) under this project.

Eco Logical Research, Inc (ELR) will perform specific design and coordination elements of the overall project in the Wenatchee, Salmon, and John Day River basins.  ELR will continue ongoing data collection efforts, response and survey design development, and analyses to summarize fish and habitat data.  

In FY2017, Eco Logical Research, Inc. will we continue to develop methods to develop fish-habitat relationships, methods to summarize data from large scale monitoring efforts, supporting watershed context, and evaluate responses to the Intensively Monitored Watersheds (IMWs).  ELR will be focusing more effort this year in developing network models to extrapolate fish and habitat models and populate life-cycle models across the Columbia River Basin (WE E, Milestone F&G).  These models include the WRAT, BRAT, VBET, RCAT LCM...d As more Bridge Creek IMW post-project data becomes available, ELR will be producing results from the restoration experiment with the intent to publish in refereed journals (WE E milestone H).  ELR also plans to implement round 2 of restoration in the Bridge Creek IMW (WE M, Milestone C).

ELR will contribute to the ISEMP Annual Progress Report (WE P), which will be compiled and submitted to BPA by Terraqua; currentFY15  contract# 69875 and FY16 CR-293052.