Evaluate the Largest Fish and Wildlife Recovery Program in the World
Web-based project management and budget tracking capabilities in cbfish.org help the Bonneville Power Administration make better decisions about funding habitat restoration and research.
The mighty Columbia River and its tributaries flow through more than 260,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest and Canada—providing vast economic benefits such as cheap electricity, transportation of goods, and irrigation of farm and ranch lands. The Columbia River Basin is also home to 15 species of salmon, steelhead, and trout that are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Protecting these vital fish runs while also supporting the many other uses of the Columbia is a core objective of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) Environment, Fish & Wildlife (EF&W) program. It is the largest program of its kind in the world, investing more than $300 million annually to support habitat restoration, research, and hatchery operations throughout the region.
The program’s rapid expansion in recent years had stretched the limits of its technology framework for allocating project budgets, tracking expenditures, and evaluating results. In 2008, Sitka Technology Group began working with BPA to create a web-based software system that would enable the EF&W program to more transparently and consistently manage project funding decisions and more accurately assess how well a project is meeting BPA objectives.
This new system, cbfish.org, gives BPA program managers and analysts a central environment in which to define project objectives, review proposed and ongoing work, approve funding requests, and view the budget history for a specific project as well as portfolios of related projects. The public cbfish.org website also allows anyone to view budget decisions, compile project data in tables that can be dynamically filtered for analysis, and examine interactive maps and charts that show where restoration or research work is taking place.
Mapping Projects in cbfish.org
Beyond its budget management capabilities, cbfish.org integrates a wealth of data from other BPA systems and external sources. For example, it can exchange information with Pisces—an application built by Sitka Technology Group for managing the EF&W program’s on-the-ground work—to provide deeper insights about a project’s accomplishments and status in relation to its funding history or other criteria. (See related story here.)
“The region should feel real ownership in what we’re doing for fish and wildlife, and (cbfish.org) gives anyone the tools to see exactly what we’re accomplishing at any level of detail,” said Greg Delwiche, former vice president of the BPA EF&W program.
The web-based software has also drawn praise from independent researchers for its transparency and ease of access. “I was amazed by how easily your site can generate both overviews and maps that have up-to-the-minute data,” said Eve Vogel, a political geographer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Prior to implementing its cbfish.org system, BPA managed the EF&W budget decisions using a variety of tools, including a massive spreadsheet that required program managers to enter data and make updates manually. This tedious process took an inordinate amount of time away from other priorities. Because data about proposals, decision histories, and project budgets were managed in disconnected systems, BPA leaders often struggled to compile reliable assessments of the program’s progress toward meeting its obligations under the Northwest Power Act, Endangered Species Act, and other regulatory mandates.
Drawing on its experience designing Pisces and similar technology systems for various natural-resources management organizations, Sitka Technology Group met with BPA program managers to crystallize their objectives for cbfish.org. For example, the new system needed to integrate tightly with BPA’s existing PeopleSoft financial software so that users wouldn’t have to manually search or update multiple applications.
The Sitka Technology team ensured that budget data entered in cbfish.org is automatically available to the PeopleSoft module and other BPA applications—making cbfish.org the system of record for managing program obligations, objectives, activities, and accomplishments. Sitka also culled through several years’ worth of financial records in the previous spreadsheet-based system and pulled the relevant information into cbfish.org so users could start generating reports and charts immediately.
Launched in collaboration with the Northwest Power & Conservation Council (NPCC) in 2009, the cbfish.org site has succeeded in making EF&W projects easier to evaluate from multiple angles. Status reports that formerly took days or weeks to compile are now being generated in minutes with a few mouse clicks, and interested parties can analyze the data at a deeper level than was possible before.
Future plans for cbfish.org include expanding its integration with other regional natural-resources management data systems such as Monitoring Methods (www.monitoringmethods.org), an online repository of aquatic research protocols that Sitka Technology developed for the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership and the State of the Salmon Program. (See related story here.)
BPA and Sitka are also working to enable automatic data exchange between cbfish.org and the National Marine Fisheries Service to further streamline reporting activities for the EF&W program.
The partners in cbfish.org “are building a first-class, user-friendly project tracking, reporting, and information sleuthing tool,” said Tony Grover, NPCC Fish and Wildlife director.
Visit www.cbfish.org to learn more about the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Program.
