PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 37: Floodplain Restoration
Tuesday, August 9, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 513 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Freshwater habitat restoration actions in the Pacific Northwest : A 10 year census.
Katz, Stephen*,1, Barnas, Katie1, 1 NorthWest Fisheries Sicence Center, Seattle, WA, USA
ABSTRACT- Across the Pacific Northwest both public and private money is being spent in diverse efforts to improve habitat for endangered salmon with little or no knowledge of specific linkages between the actions that are taken and the responses of threatened populations. Targeted effectiveness monitoring of these actions is required to redress this lack of specific mechanistic understanding of project performance, but such monitoring is in turn dependant on detailed information on what restoration is occurring—i.e. implementation monitoring. This article describes the assembling of project level data on restoration actions in the Pacific Northwest that have been undertaken to improve the freshwater habitat occupied by threatened and endangered salmonid fishes by the NorthWest Fisheries Science Center of NOAA-F. The database itself was designed specifically to address the needs of regional monitoring programs to evaluate the effectiveness of those restoration actions. The database currently contains spatially referenced, project-level data on over 26,000 restoration actions initiated at over 36,000 locations in the last 10 years in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, USA. Data sources included Federal, State and Local contributors. The process of database production has identified many important technical issues related to coordination of regional project tracking where the activities cross multiple jurisdictions. These technical issues range from low-level information like what defines a project or a location, to high-level issues such as data validation and legalities of inter-agency data sharing. The role of this data in the design of large-scale effectiveness monitoring programs will be detailed.
Key words: restoration, habitat, monitoring, database