Note: This contract has no inventory, nothing carried over, and no equipment purchases planned.
Note2: All EC issues are covered by NMFS Section 7,  on the overall Bridge Creek Restoration and Monitoring Project, Wheeler County, OR.

Contract Description: The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP, 2003-017-00) is an ongoing collaborative effort to design, test, implement and evaluate Status and Trends Monitoring for salmon and steelhead populations and their habitat, and watershed-scale Effectiveness Monitoring for management actions impacting salmon and steelhead populations and habitat in the Interior Columbia River Basin.

ISEMP explicitly addresses work requirements of many 2008 FCRPS Biological Opinion RPAs (56.1, 56.2, 56.3, 57.1, 57.2, 57.3, 57.4, 57.5) and is directly related to additional 2008 FCRPS Biological Opinion implementation strategy requirements and recommendations. ISEMP takes a pilot-project approach to the research and development of monitoring by implementing experimental programs in several major subbasins of the Interior Columbia: the Wenatchee, Entiat, Methow, John Day, South Fork Salmon and Lemhi River basins. The overall goal of the project is to provide regional salmon management agencies with the data, information and tools necessary to design efficient and effective monitoring programs.

Specifically, ISEMP generates quantitative guidance on and examples of: the robustness and limitations of population and habitat monitoring protocols, indicators and metrics; sampling design approaches for the distribution of monitoring effort in time and space; analytical approaches to the evaluation of monitoring data, information and programs; effective data management and communication designs that support the use, standardization and compilation of implementation, compliance, status, trends and effectiveness monitoring data by regional data generators and decision makers; and finally the design and implementation of watershed-scale restoration actions to maximize both the biological impact and associated learning opportunities resulting from the design and implementation strategy.

Through its work to date, ISEMP has developed expertise in the coordination and implementation of large-scale monitoring data collection programs. Applying this experience, ISEMP coordinates the installation, maintenance and calibration of in-stream PIT tag arrays across the Snake River basin and is designing and coordinating the implementation of a Columbia River basin-wide stream habitat status and trends monitoring. These programmatic implementation facets of ISEMP leverage previous experience with logistics and social factors to effectively implement comprehensive, standardized monitoring research and development at an unprecedented scale.  

This contract is one of several contracts that will implement this project.

Volk Consulting facilitates data flow, work flow and management (protocol development, data entry, data qa/qc, data delivery, GIS data management and database output) for the ISEMP pilot projects. Volk Consulting also participates as a project coordinator and data analyst within ISEMP.