Standardizing Taxonomic Effort in the Pacific Northwest to Increase Data Harmonization among Monitoring Programs

As an important food source for numerous fish, macroinvertebrates are often collected to assess fish habitat and resource availability.   Samples of collected invertebrates are often subsampled and analyzed for taxonomic composition and community analyses.  Until recently there have been few efforts to standardize the nomenclature and taxonomic targets of invertebrate samples.  The development of the Pacific Northwest Standard Taxonomic Effort (PNW- STE) allows students, laboratories, and researchers to assist in the standardization and harmonization of macroinvertebrate data.  The PNW- STE reduces the variability of taxonomic nomenclature among laboratories, increases the comparability of data across agencies, and provides data consumers with a taxonomically accurate tool to with habitat and food web assessments.  The PNW-STE targets life stages and taxa known to occur in benthic bioassessment samples of the PNW. The process and development of the PNW-STE will be presented as well as planned operation and maintenance. We will discuss how the PNW-STE will improve macroinvertebrate data quality in the region, will evolve to include guidance for life stages and taxa from non-benthically collected samples, and  allow for the evolution of invertebrate taxonomic understanding without orphaning historical datasets.