Methods Review

One of PNAMP's objectives is to understand Partners' needs with respect to monitoring methodology and facilitate collaboration, coordination, discussion, and evaluation of implementation of monitoring methodology. If you've had the chance to browse through the list of methods on MonitoringMethods.org, you may have noticed that measurements may be collected using different methods. Methods may be different because of different study objectives, locations, equipment used, or differing opinions of practitioners about what is the best practice. For collaborative projects or programs that share data, it can be difficult to appropriately combine datasets if there is a lack of understanding of the details of the methods used to collect the data.

With the development of the Monitoring Methods/Community Forum tool, we hope to start to provide more consistency in documentation and therefore a better understanding between practitioners about what everyone is doing. Further, we anticipate discussions on the community forum about implementation of monitoring methods, study design details, etc. It is expected that these discussions will help point out agreements and inconsistencies related to methods, but may not always have a clear resolution. With the Methods Review effort, we will use the community forum discussions, as well as previous PNAMP discussions, as a basis to plan for technical workshops focused on discussing the current state of affairs for a particular protocol or method, inconsistencies and disagreements, and how to move forward. All discussions and final outcomes, whether it be agreement to use a particular method or agreement that different methods are necessary, will be documented and available online for future reference.