Monitoring Site Manager

PNAMP is pursuing development of an online tool (Monitoring Site Manager) to document site information, specifically to support information associated with master samples and sample designs created in the Monitoring Sample Designer (described above). The Site Manager will be the place users can explore sites in master samples and monitoring projects, will support users in drawing from master samples to design their own surveys, and will allow users to upload their own sites, attributes and evaluations.

Explorer feature of the Monitoring Site Manager

During 2011, PNAMP participants often expressed the need for an online tool that provided geographic information linked with information about the 'who and what' of monitoring activities, or an inventory for specific locations. The need for the tool was described in the Regional Metadata Tool Recommendations report and by the participants in the initial Habitat Data Sharing workshop. But, this idea is not a new one. The concept and need for this tool was first identified in the 2005 PNAMP Strategy. In 2006, StreamNet and NOAA contractors worked with PNAMP to develop a pilot inventory of aquatic monitoring activities in the region. However, while attempts to produce an inventory may have been successful, the efforts can be costly and time consuming, at which point, the inventory is likely out of date. The real need is to be able to collect and manage this type of information real-time, while allowing others to query for their purposes at any given point to meet their own needs.

Given recent technological advances and the repeated requests from participants in 2011, PNAMP decided to pursue the idea of developing a feature ('Explorer') in the Site Manager that would collect and manage additional information associated with monitoring sites and their overall projects that could provide a more comprehensive look at what monitoring was occurring in a particular location in the region. The intent would be to provide information from multiple organizations in one online resource so users wouldn’t have to search through a variety of project tracking databases to gather the information they needed.

Additional information that should be included in this resource will be informed by a scoping exercise used to gather feedback from PNAMP participants. As for details of this new 'Explorer' feature, we expect it will need to provide access to available monitoring site locations across the region, contact information, some level of detail about what was monitored at each site, and basic project details. When available, it could also provide information about the sampling design and the types and location of data collected. Finally, the idea is that a majority of data would come in via web services - we would need to map data fields from other databases to the fields we decide to collect, but we would also offer a manual entry option.