From Fish to Website: Managing Steelhead Abundance Data for Northeast-Central Oregon

The North-East Central Oregon Fish Research and Monitoring Program (NECORM) is a fish research and monitoring program within the Oregon Department and Wildlife (ODFW). NECORM staff are responsible for collecting, analyzing and reporting population-level data for the Endangered Species Act (ESA) listed steelhead populations in the Interior Columbia domain in support of NOAA Fisheries status reviews and viability assessments.  Data requirements for status reviews are intensive and time consuming to produce, and, up until recently, population-level estimates were created, maintained, and shared with little collaboration or standardization of the datasets.  In addition, methods documents for these important and widely used datasets were scattered among numerous documents, incomplete, and updated infrequently.  From 2014-2015, NECORM steelhead abundance data was submitted to a data steward, standardized, compiled in a database and posted online on the ODFW Salmon and Steelhead Recovery Tracker website.  In addition, a comprehensive methods document, metadata, and data flow diagrams were created and made available online.  This poster will present the data management process, results, and lessons learned from transforming 15 disparate spreadsheets, totaling 513 years of data, into a fully documented, standardized and easily shareable dataset.