How Were Your Data Collected 5, 10, 15 Years Ago?

Aquatic monitoring programs in the Pacific Northwest have evolved independently in response to different organizational and jurisdictional mandates and needs. To enhance efficiency and effectiveness of efforts, the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership(PNAMP) provides a forum to support collaboration and coordination. One goal of our work is identifying best practices for data management and exchange.

PNAMP coordinates development of cloud-based applications to promote recording details of monitoring programs. The suite of complementary tools, MonitoringResources.org, assists practitioners with describing how, when, where and why data are collected. The goal is to allow practitioners to easily document once and share many times – greatly leveraging their information investment. Colleagues and their information systems (e.g., project tracking systems, databases, metadata repositories) can access and learn from the information. Funders and managers can review existing and proposed work and better understand gaps and overlaps in a given spatial extent. 

The tools not only capture details about program implementation; they also support collaboration and data exchange. They are integrated to allow engagement in more useful planning with colleagues. In addition, long term storage will preserve yearly documentation, making it easy to find details about how data were collected or analyzed, thus facilitating data exchange efforts.