High Level Indicators
In recent years, there has been heightened interest at the executive level in improving our collective ability to track and communicate changes in environmental conditions and salmon in easily understood terms. Doing so fosters accountability, encourages consensus, supports priority-setting and budgeting, and can engender support. High-level indicators (HLIs) are a way to communicate complex information in easily understood terms for use in reports to Congress, legislatures, governors, and the public. HLIs are constructed to convey summarized information at broad scales, to address the following kinds of questions posed by decision-makers:
· What is the status of biological (salmon) and physical (habitat) conditions at identified scales (e.g., region-wide, statewide)?
· How are those conditions changing over time?
· Are freshwater and estuarine habitats healthy and productive?
In May 2008, participants in the Northwest Environmental Information Sharing (NWEIS) executive summit agreed to initiate the task of identifying high-level indicators (HLI) currently in use across the Pacific Northwest (PNW), with the understanding that this would inform the long term goal of achieving a core set of indicators that could be used to communicate salmon status and ecosystem health to Congress, legislatures, governors, and the public. PNAMP was invited to provide information in support of this task, including: (1) high level indicators currently in use in the PNW; (2) who is using the indicator; and to the extent possible, (3) metrics being used to support the indicator. PNAMP presented the NWEIS group with a report in October 2009 that summarized their approach to this task, initial findings, and recommendations for executive consideration
· October 2008 report
Building upon this earlier work, PNAMP drafted a second report that substantively advances and provides recommendations for watershed health and salmon indicators. PNAMP’s work has continued to benefit considerably from coordination with a number of ongoing HLI reporting efforts focused on watershed health and salmon.
· May 2009 report
