Data Management for an Intensively Monitored Watershed

The Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) Watershed Program approached the NWFSC Scientific Data Management (SDM) team to help them manage data associated with the Straits Intensively Monitored Watershed (IMW) project, which seeks to determine the effects of watershed restoration on pacific salmonid abundance. SDM has helped transition from manually loading and storing PIT tag, smolt, and habitat data in multiple locations using spreadsheets and personal databases into a web-accessible relational database with automated data loading and retrieval on demand, and consistent queries over multiple years. Work for this project included data process flow diagramming, metadata documentation, data cleanup (QA/QC), data migration from a desktop application to a web enabled application, automated machine processing of raw field data, automated analysis, query and extraction, and enhanced presentation of analyzed outputs.