Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP)

*Please check back for more infomation as we prepare for the workshop and as we finalize things after the workshop.

Exploration of Project & Action Tracking, Planning, Reporting, Data Exchange & Interface Technology

December 1-2, 2009

Doubletree Lloyd Center Hotel, Portland, Oregon (link to event site)

In the Pacific Northwest, significant time and money has been spent in research and development of action tracking systems for environmental conservation and restoration to meet individual organization needs for planning, compliance and reporting. With the need to demonstrate accomplishments toward shared goals and shrinking financial resources it has become more important to share results and accomplishments across jurisdictions, as well as to move toward more cooperative approaches for programmatic implementation of environmental strategies. Coordination of implementation tracking efforts offers an opportunity to establish partnerships to support environmental conservation and restoration activity planning, prioritization, gap analyses, fiscal accountability, and accomplishments reporting. It also provides a foundation to support action effectiveness evaluations, or report on the performance of implementation to help inform adaptive management and program compliance. This workshop will consider a number of  subject areas used in existing systems, such as project and action level data; planning and assessments; habit restoration actions; and indicators, metrics, and performance measures for research, monitoring and evaluation.

 The purpose of this workshop will be to:

Initial planning for this workshop has taken into consideration many ongoing efforts, with the goal of leveraging existing work and ideas to improve regional implementation tracking. For example, the following data systems in Table 1 (below) share many common features; the publications "Meeting of Project Tracking Database Experts: Supporting NFHAP Project Data System Development Recommendations to the Science and Data Team" (NFHAP), and “Data Management Needs for Regional Project Tracking to Support Implementation and Effectiveness Monitoring” (Katz et. al.) provide some insight on standards for implementation monitoring tracking systems or for evaluation and reporting needs. Metadata documents, guidance and other implementation tracking documents provided by existing data systems and additional workshop products will be posted on this webpage as they are available.  To support the workshop, a few pre-workshop products will be distributed to inform work sessions and presentations. This includes a survey that will be distributed to each participant to help map the functions and interactions of existing or planned tracking systems. Ideally, participants will coordinate one response per tracking system. Another product in development is the Implementation Program Attribute Crosswalk Table that may be used to facilitate common terminology through standard collection or reporting data dictionaries.   As these products are distributed we will ask for your input in order to improve what is presented at the workshop.