There are three significant aspects of the "Integrated" (Council/BPA) Fish and Wildlife Program:
• Northwest Power Act (NWPA) compliance through regional collaboration the Northwest Power & Conservation Council (NPCC),
• Endangered Species Act (ESA) compliance through NOAA and USFWS issued Biological Opinions (BiOps),
• Tribal Treaty trust, currently being extended through 10-year Columbia Basin Fish Accords for funding and environmental work.

The above aspects consist of complex, political, and collaborative activities and data needs, and all aspects are emerging rapidly as the Program goes through unprecedented growth and changes in the next few years (FY2009 - FY2012). The requirements for defining, tracking, and reporting on these multi-faceted commitments and their funding implications for BPA’s financial management is critical and significant. Increases in resources and systems capability will be necessary to execute the regulatory, legal, and management requirements before us, essentially supporting a Program that is doubling in size within 2 years. The signing of the first set of Fish Accords on May 2, 2008, and the FCRPS BiOp ruling and decision in June 2008, made the timing and scheduling for implementing the systems to help the Program manage this workload and tracking urgent.

BPA Fish and Wildlife's vision for solving a wide range of program and project tracking and reporting challenges is to implement and support a web application (www.cbfish.org, aka "Taurus"), that offers BPA, its partners, and its constituents a rich, integrated experience for finding information and data about the Program. This web application (with a public-facing website) will be a cornerstone application that BPA uses to manage the project portfolio data to support budget management, decision-making processes, and reporting.

Other parts of the system will support decision-making and reporting processes for the Council, ISRP, and likely the Action Agencies in the future phases. The vision and scope of this project is essentially enhancing a very basic system that was created at the end of the Pisces project. This system needs to be externally hosted and supported as a critical investment funded by the Fish and Wildlife Program, and positioned as a partnership with both the Council and NOAA for enhancing information sharing and collaboration. This project (and long-term maintenance of infrastructure) is an "Internal Program Support" project, likely funded out of the General fund, ensuring it is first and foremost meeting BPA’s range of requirements for management of the Program. It will integrate with the BPA-supported and housed Pisces operational system. It will also include further integration of the Aries reporting component system with both Taurus and Pisces