Share Research Techniques to Monitor Salmon and Habitat Health
Web-based software equips the aquatic research community with centralized data resources and easy-to-use tools for documenting scientific protocols and methods.
A field crew taking measurements on Camas Creek (WA) for the PIBO protocol. Photo by Steve Lanigan, USFS.
Natural resource management agencies and Native American tribes have been monitoring salmon and their habitat for decades. In recent years, the information that researchers collect has become even more important to people in the Pacific Northwest as many wild salmon populations have become endangered or threatened.
Accurately assessing the overall progress of salmon recovery requires consistent scientific research methods and the ability to combine study data among dozens of government and nonprofit groups involved in aquatic species and habitat monitoring. To improve collaboration and knowledge sharing in this field, Sitka Technology Group recently helped the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP) and the State of the Salmon Program create an online software application called Monitoring Methods (www.monitoringmethods.org) that supports more consistent, detailed documentation of research protocols.
Launched in spring 2011, the web-based system provides a central location for aquatic researchers, habitat monitoring practitioners, and restoration program managers to share their protocols and methods—essentially, the building blocks for conducting a scientific study and reporting the results. Site visitors can browse Monitoring Methods to view more than 400 protocols and descriptions of more than 800 methods, which can be quickly filtered by keywords to home in on a specific research area. Registered users can further explore categories of measurement data that have been collected or analyzed by the various protocols.
Browsing the full list of protocols in monitoringmethods.org
When registered users create draft protocols in Monitoring Methods, they can invite others to review and comment on the documentation. Monitoring Methods also includes a general community forum where they can initiate and participate in discussions on relevant topics, such as best practices or lessons learned.
Prior to the launch of this system, monitoring practitioners in the region lacked a cohesive place to document how they design their studies, collect data and analyze the findings. Research methods and the level of associated documentation vary widely from one program to another. Even within a single organization, there is not a common approach to recording and sharing a project’s sample design or assumptions. Not surprisingly, inconsistent methods can complicate efforts by natural resource management agencies such as the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service to aggregate the results from multiple studies. Building upon its initial efforts to build a prototype of a centralized protocol library, PNAMP brought Sitka Technology Group into the project to develop a full-scale, production-level application. PNAMP selected Sitka partly on the strength of its success designing similar applications for Bonneville Power Administration’s environment, fish and wildlife program.
In discussions with PNAMP, the State of the Salmon Program and numerous monitoring practitioners, the Sitka team learned that members of the research community often have fundamentally different ways of defining protocols, methods and other basic terminology. To help overcome this discord and anchor the Monitoring Methods library, Sitka started by integrating a glossary of more than 40 common terms into the software system. When users encounter glossary terms associated with a tool or description in Monitoring Methods, they can click on the term to view its definition and, in many cases, links to supplemental information.
Example of one of the glossary terms in monitoringmethods.org
To help researchers more easily document their protocols and methods, Sitka developed online templates with built-in guidance on how to organize information in various categories. The system also generates a summary page for each protocol or method to help other monitoring practitioners quickly locate relevant materials on the website.
Protocol summaries include the document’s background, photos, illustrations, rationale and objectives; an overview of the research study design; links to each method used by the protocol; and notes on the personnel, schedule and budget involved. Summaries of a specific method include step-by-step instructions, photos and diagrams, and links to the protocols in which the method is being used.
In addition, the Sitka team has created a set of web services for Monitoring Methods that allow it to exchange information with other organizations’ database management systems, such as the BPA Fish and Wildlife Program’s cbfish.org website (see related story here). Through this integration, researchers in different organizations can register their usage of specific protocols and methods that reside on the Monitoring Methods website—which helps the author of that document know whom to tap for feedback about it.
“Sitka’s data management and technology expertise are helping us promote more consistent protocols and methods and deeper knowledge sharing among practitioners,” says PNAMP Assistant Coordinator Jacque Schei. “By consolidating best practices and detailed protocols on a single website, Monitoring Methods will enable the research community to generate higher-quality data while spending less time on documentation tasks.”
Sitka tailored the Monitoring Methods data model and functionality based on extensive input from Pacific Northwest researchers, management agencies, funding organizations, and policymakers about what types of data they need most and how it should be presented. These insights helped Sitka, PNAMP and State of the Salmon make the online tool and user interface more intuitive for practitioners who have little or no previous experience documenting their protocols.
“With the online tools that Sitka has created, individual practitioners now have access to detailed information about commonly used monitoring techniques from around the Pacific Northwest,” says Cathy Kellon, the Water & Watersheds Program manager at Ecotrust. “Moreover, the community of practitioners now has a place to share its cumulative knowledge with broader audiences. Everyone who cares about tracking the health of our watersheds—whether you’re an academic or a manager—can benefit from what Monitoring Methods offers: a better understanding of what’s being measured, how, where and for what end.”
