In FY2017, Terraqua, Inc will continue to be intimately involved in both programmatic oversight and implementation of CHaMP across the Columbia River Basin.  Terraqua was instrumental in the development and initial execution of CHaMP and will continue to participate in planning and oversight as a member of executive and technical teams via frequent conference calls and face-to-face meetings.  In addition, Terraqua will continue to organize and coordinate implementation of the annual field training event, provide instructors for the different modules, and send crews to participate in the training prior to beginning field work, which involves CHaMP implementation in the Wenatchee, Entiat and Methow subbasins at up to 68 sites. Terraqua will also continue to be involved in CHaMP analysis, tool development, and model validation efforts, primarily through the work of the CHaMP geomorphologist, but with other staff where needed.  This contribution allows for improvements in field data processing and derivation of simple and complex metrics; supports the use of CHaMP data by analysts to address watershed-specific goals and to provide watershed-level context for site level information; aids in the development of approaches to extrapolate site level data to the entire network and, ultimately, mechanisms to feed data into decision-support products such as the ISEMP life-cycle model. Terraqua will continue to work with its CHaMP partners and collaborators, BPA, and other interested parties to prioritize these efforts within the region. Specific examples of such involvement include providing metrics, indicators, and synthesis products to the Expert Panel Process; assisting BPA with a monitoring synthesis to inform AMIP; responding to BPA's synthesis and evaluation of data to aid in CE and BA development; guiding adaptive management at the watershed and basin-scale; and responding to ISRP/AB NPCC requests.  Terraqua’s technical writers and editors will continue as leads for the compilation of material from CHaMP collaborators for inclusion in an annual RME technical report, published jointly with the Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP; BPA Project 2003-017-00).  Terraqua will also continue to support CHaMP collaborators and implementation across the Columbia River Basin by sub-contracting with Rhithron Associates for the processing of macroinvertebrate samples; with Watershed Solutions, Inc. to lead the coordination of technical matters related to the development and implementation of CHaMP; and with a sub-contractor for logistical and security support during CHaMP Camp.

Timeline:
2011- coordinate CHaMP across the CRB and implement CHaMP in the UC
2012 – coordinate CHaMP across the CRB and implement CHaMP in the UC
2013 – coordinate CHaMP across the CRB and implement CHaMP in the UC
2014 - coordinate CHaMP across the CRB and implement CHaMP in the UC
2015 - Contract amendment to add additional funds to the budget to cover work requested by AEM that was outside the original scope of Terraqua's contract. This work is identified in WE C 18.1c Conduct CHaMP fish habitat surveys in the Entiat river watershed. Terraqua is continuing to coordinate with AEM to collect additional data required by AEM, at select CHaMP sites identified by AEM, as part of the Entiat IMW effectiveness monitoring being conducted by Terraqua. Habitat monitoring in the IMW is implemented under a split rotating panel design. One of two sites identified by AEM for sampling in 2015 was not scheduled to be sampled by Terraqua in 2015. In order for Terraqua to add this site to its schedule additional funds in the amount of $4,547 were been added to the contract. The contract budget was also amended with an additional $15,650 to reflect actual costs incurred in FY14 for Terraqua staff to support AEM implementation in the Upper Columbia in 2015.
2016 - coordinate CHaMP across the CRB and implement CHaMP in the UC

Background:
In support of habitat restoration, rehabilitation and conservation action performance assessments and adaptive management requirements of the 2008 Federal Columbia River Power System Biological Opinion (FCRPS BiOp), the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is working with NOAA and other regional fish management agencies to monitor status and trends of fish habitat for each major population group (MPG) in the Pacific Northwest identified through the Endangered Species Act (ESA).  Status monitoring provides information on the quantity and quality of current habitat and thus maximizes spatial coverage with a given number of sample sites.  Trend monitoring is used to detect changes in habitat through time and thus requires repeat samples at given sites.  Minimizing sampling and measurement error is crucial in order to differentiate this variability from natural variability though time and space.  
In order to compare information across multiple MPGs, BPA is adopting a standardized fish habitat monitoring protocol, the Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program (CHaMP) for the Columbia River Basin monitoring programs.  CHaMP is a Columbia River basin-wide habitat status and trends monitoring program built around a single habitat monitoring protocol with a program-wide approach to data collection and management which meets FCRPS Action Agency (2010) programmatic prescriptions for habitat monitoring.    CHaMP will help BPA meet the requirements of the 2008 FCRPS BiOp and RPA 56.3.  This program will provide information on the status/trends in habitat conditions, and will support habitat restoration, rehabilitation and conservation actions, performance assessments, and the adaptive management requirements of the 2008 FCRPS BiOp.  In addition, the CHaMP meets RPA 56.3, RPA 57, and RPA 3 by characterizing stream and fish responses to watershed restoration and/or management actions in at least one population within each steelhead and Chinook MPG which have, or will have, fish in-fish out monitoring (identified in RPA 50.6).  The watersheds originally identified for CHaMP include: Hood River, Wind River, Toppenish, Klickitat, Fifteen Mile, Lower Mainstem JD, North Fork JD, Upper Mainstem JD, Middle Fork JD, South Fork JD, Umatilla, Upper Grande Ronde, Catherine Ck, Imnaha, Lolo Ck, Tucannon, Asotin, SF Salmon, Big Ck, Lemhi, Pahsimeroi, Wenatchee, Entiat, Methow, and Okanogan.  These watersheds were chosen to maximize the contrast in current habitat conditions and also represent a temporal gradient of expected change in condition through planned habitat actions.  CHaMP was implemented in the first year of implementation FY11, in a subset of these subbasins, which are referred to as the pilot watersheds and include: Lower Mainstem JD, North Fork JD, Upper Mainstem JD, Middle Fork JD, South Fork JD, Upper Grande Ronde, Catherine Ck, Tucannon, SF Salmon, Lemhi, Wenatchee, Entiat, and Methow, In FY15, CHaMP will be implemented in these same pilot watersheds but implement a reduction in sampling intensity by ELR in the John Day.  Coordination and support of CHaMP deliverables associated with additional watersheds beyond those included in the list of pilot watersheds are outside the scope and budget of this contract.

CHaMP collaborators will be supported by cross-project data management, stewardship and analysis staff, annual pre- and post-season meetings, annual field protocol and data management tool implementation training sessions.  The project collaborators worked with the US Forest Service PIBO staff monitoring program to coordinate on "efficiencies" with implementation of both the CHaMP and PIBO monitoring programs through FY15, and continue to coordinate with and support BPA's Acton Effectiveness Monitoring (AEM) program; however, substantial AEM development and implementation support is outside the scope and budget of this contract.

(1)             Roles
CHaMP staff - refers to individuals under contract with BPA through the following list of contractors (e.g. Terraqua, Inc., QCI, SFR, Sitka) and includes Chris Jordan (NOAA) who is principle investigator (PI) of Project #2011-006-00.  Collaborators/Collaborating Agencies:  Refers to those contractors implementing CHaMP status/trend monitoring under Project #2011-006. First-Time Collaborators - Refers to collaborators whose first year of sampling is 2016.  Returning Collaborators - Refers to collaborators whose first year of sampling was 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, or 2015.  Together, the CHaMP General and Technical Coordinators, with support staff and direction from the PI, coordinate all program activities: 1) among ISEMP/CHaMP staff; 2) among ISEMP/CHaMP staff and program funders and cost share partners (e.g., BPA, PNAMP, NOAA Fisheries, etc.); 3) between ISEMP/CHaMP staff and policy makers with interests in program operations, design, and results (e.g., BPA, NOAA Fisheries, PNAMP, co-managers, and other federal/tribal/state agencies); 4) among ISEMP/CHaMP staff and contracting officers, environmental compliance officers, and others responsible for the execution of this work and work related to CHaMP; 5) between ISEMP/CHaMP staff and technical staff from other related programs such as PNAMP, ISTM, USFS/BLM, and state/tribal habitat monitoring programs such as those run by WDOE, and ODEQ; and 6) between ISEMP/CHaMP staff and biologists and field crews of collaborating agencies. The General Coordinator facilitates development of the overall project budget and scopes of work to ensure that all CHaMP objectives and deliverables are met.  The CHaMP Lead Technical Coordinator oversees the coordination of the technical work of the various CHaMP contractors and collaborators in the continuing development and implementation of CHaMP to meet the needs of BPA and other management institutions, to the extent deemed necessary by BPA. Co-coordination requires extensive collaboration with the numerous entities who are participating in CHaMP, particularly in the area of protocol development, preseason planning, training, data capture, data storage, raw data quality assurance/control and metric generation, data management, analysis, reporting, and dissemination of information.  The Co-coordinators represent the interests of CHaMP at meetings throughout the region and coordinate electronically and in-person with other entities that are developing materials related to CHaMP.  The L Coordinators also; provide support for the CHaMP Project Management Team to ensure that CHaMP meets the scientific, strategic, and fiduciary needs of BPA and NOAA; and participate as part of the Data Management Advisory Team to implement workflow enhancements across the program.  Additional duties include technical program oversight, leadership, budgeting, meeting facilitation, work planning, metric/indicator and measurement oversight, and regional coordination efforts.

Program Elements:

(2) Sampling Design
A Generalized Random-Tessellation Sampling (GRTS) survey design was recommended by Crawford and Rumsey (2009) for monitoring habitat status and trend in the Columbia River Basin.  The GRTS design was initially developed under the EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program and is a probabilistic sampling design that has been shown to be advantageous for generating habitat condition parameters with known statistical characteristics.  The CHaMP monitoring design follows a basic GRTS framework with a 3 year rotating 1-to-1 split panel structure to distribute sampling effort in space and time, and has developed tools for sampling design development and management across the CHaMP, ISEMP, and AEM programs.  Implementing a GRTS survey design correctly is critical to producing a final dataset with known statistical characteristics requiring the implementation of strict procedures during the site evaluation and selection process.  A GRTS Site Selection Protocol and Sample DesignerTool is provided used across the program to support field crews with efficiently completing the process while strictly enforcing design requirements.  

(3) Field Sampling
Habitat field sampling will follow the CHaMP protocol (Bouwes et al. 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016).  The protocol was modified after initial publication in 2011 to make improvements based on lessons learned during 2012, 2013 and further refine workflow descriptions after protocol stabilization. The CHaMP protocol was developed after a review of fish habitat requirements, interactions of processes that influence fish habitat, the spatial scales for the context of these interactions, and current monitoring programs. The CHaMP protocol has the greatest probability of being comparable to other protocols, is most relevant to salmonids, and was designed to be applied across varying spatial contexts depending on the logistical constrains of the sites.  In areas where GPS signals can be obtained, along with aerial photos, habitat units within reaches can be superimposed onto aerial photos with a map grade GPS.  In situations, where a GPS signal is not obtainable, units can be referenced to aerial photos and supplemented with on the ground measurements.  All approaches use a GPS map-grade data logger and thus do not require new gear for differing spatial contexts across related approaches.  

(i) Standardized Crew Training: Sampling and Data Capture
Standardized field crew training in the recommended methods will be provided to/required of all CHaMP field crews.  This programmatic approach is used to promote crew efficiency and improved standardization across the region.  In addition to agency-specific safety and other training, CHaMP staff will provide training to cooperating agencies that implement the CHaMP habitat protocol as well as the AEM protocol, the implementation of which relies on many CHaMP methods and tools.

(ii) QA/QC crews to do repeat sampling across all participating watersheds
Repeated sampling of habitat monitoring sites within the same sampling season has proven to be an important component of GRTS-based, watershed-scale habitat monitoring.  Repeat sampling assists with 1) quality assurance/quality control, 2) the assessment of crew variability as a component of variation, and 3) improvements to temporal variability recognition (i.e., trend detection).  Furthermore, repeat sampling is important to CHaMP's ongoing evaluation of the performance of the protocol across the Columbia River Basin.  Therefore, in FY17 CHaMP will continue to coordinate, and implement limited repeat sampling at least 1 site per CHaMP watershed by local or nearby crew(s) funded from their watershed budgets.  

(4) Data Management

Monitoring habitat in the CHaMP watersheds generates a massive volume of data.  The CHaMPMonitoring.org data management system provides a programmatic framework for data upload, processing, storage, reporting, and distribution to support (a) documenting monitoring objectives and study design; (b) summarizing how, when, and where the monitoring data were collected, (c) supporting a range of analytical methods, such as hypothesis testing and time series analysis, and GIS support; and (d) adapting to changing requirements in the future.  

(i) Field Data Loggers
Crews need field equipment and applications to support data capture, review, and upload to the data management system. A suite of handheld and desktop tools that use XML-based applications to document metadata about project and statistical design, enter site and visit information and measurements, perform quality assurance, and submit data for program-level review, metric generation, and storage.

(ii) GIS Data Management and Geoprocessing

The large spatial scales that CHaMP  covers means that assimilating and managing spatial datasets in GIS, accounting for the geomorphic context of sampling, and performing watershed or subbasin-scale analyses are important features of the program. CHaMP provides all collaborators with GIS data management and processing assistance, and expertise in the development of geospatial models, the use of remote sensing technologies to collect continuous GIS datasets, such as LIDAR and aerial photos, and integrating field-based tabular data within a geospatial context.

(iii) Data Storage and Retrieval

CHaMP has multiple groups collecting data.  Therefore, it is critical to make data accessible and available for use by all collaborators.  The CHaMP data management system (see www.CHaMPMonitoring.org) includes a centralized data warehouse and web-based data discovery tool; data exchange and loading procedures; a database schema that defines data storage format; metadata tools; data capture, validation, and summary tools; quality control and assurance procedures. Staff and servers from Sitka Technology Group support the data management system.
Beginning in FY16, CHaMP began to employ cloud computing through Amazon Web Services to support the development and management of secondary models and outputs by analysts in a more flexible computing environment.  The use of AWS for more rapid development and curation of synthesis models and outputs will continue in FY17 as a complement to the existing CM.org data management system, which will remain the centralized repository and mechanism for access to final CHaMP metrics, indicators, and products.

(5) Analysis

Physical fluvial geomorphic processes drive the habitat metrics and indicators that CHaMP generates for the use by decision makers.  To better understand these processes and further develop and validate synthesis products, several areas of geomorphologic analysis were initiated in 2015 by the CHaMP Project Geomorphologist and others.  The use and development of River Styles as a CHaMP tools will no longer occur as of FY2017.  Instead, development of geomorphology tools that will support other more common valley and channel classification systems, including Rosgen, will occur from FY 2017 forward.  

(6) Reporting

As of CY2015, ISEMP and CHaMP produce a joint annual technical report. Report materials are developed by ISEMP and CHaMP contractors and delivered to Terraqua, Inc. for compilation into a single report for transfer to BPA. The ISEMP/CHaMP Integrated Technical Report focuses on:

1. Results from ISEMP Intensively Monitored Watersheds (IMWs).
2. Fish status and trend data
3. Habitat status and trend data
4. Fish/habitat relationships

Due to the performance dates of the contracts associated with this reporting requirement (2/15/2016 - 2/14/2017) the CY2016 RME Integrated ISEMP/CHaMP Technical report will be completed under subsequent FY17 contracts.

(7) Outreach and Workshop(s)

From 2011-2014, feedback and lessons learned dialogue occurred in the form of a workshop and other follow-up mechanisms to address the questions and comments posed by the ISRP and the Council pertaining to CHaMP, review the past field season and data, discuss the protocol, review the draft logistics/RME and BiOp reports, and plan the next season. Topics covered included a programmatic overview of CHaMP, an overview of the study design and objectives, review of the protocol and data management tools, and analytical approaches.  After FY14 and significant protocol stabilization, a post-season workshop was deemed no longer necessary; however, use of a post-season survey was continued to solicit feedback on the field season and allow prioritization of further refinements to program workflow, if/as needed. The survey will be a component of FY17 implementation.  Outreach via a workshop in FY15 focused on sharing ISEMP-CHaMP analyses and synthesis results with collaborators, while in FY16 an advanced workshop was held to facilitate collaborators’ use of CHaMP-ISEMP tools beyond RBT, such as GCD, hydraulic model, and HSI.  This type of strategic workshop/outreach to collaborators will continue in FY17.