Natural resource monitoring is critical to collecting, organizing and distributing information in support of natural resource decision-making. Because monitoring activities are often specific to a discipline, issue or agency, it is typically difficult to integrate data and information to answer questions that transcend geopolitical and jurisdictional boundaries. Enterprise resources that support large-scale, long-term monitoring and data interoperability would improve our ability to efficiently produce and use landscape-scale information for a variety of applications.
MonitoringResources.org is a non-proprietary, free and open access suite of enterprise monitoring tools developed and maintained by USGS and the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP).
The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat), a multi-national, multi-agency coordinated bat monitoring program, was developed to better understand the status and trends of North American bats and to provide guidance for monitoring and conservation at local, regional, and national scales. Similar to other large-scale monitoring programs, the ultimate success of NABat relies on resources to help ensure data are collected and managed in a consistent manner. PNAMP coordinated with NABat to document requirements, needs, and workflows, then outlined and oversaw development of enhancements to MonitoringResource.org existing capacity to support NABat.
Results/Conclusions
Enhancements were made to MonitoringResources.org existing web applications, data discovery tools, and metadata documentation to support NABat’s need to coordinate, document, track, share and report on sample design information. Monitoring practitioners from across the North America can now coordinate survey site and protocol selection. The tool supports NABat users in the selection, documentation, evaluation and downloading of monitoring site location and sample protocols. The metadata associated with monitoring site selection can then be referenced in reports used by statisticians, monitoring practitioners, and resource managers to better understand sample design, site selection, and monitoring protocols associated with each site. We also improved resources available to report implementation details such as field locations and sample date. This information can be used in data discovery tools to integrate data and information that transcend geopolitical and jurisdictional boundaries.
The development, workflow and lessons learned enhancing MonitoringResources.org were documented and made available to other local-to-continental scale monitoring programs, including the developing North American Monarch Monitoring initiative. Thus, NABat will serve as not only an operational pilot that leverages on capacity provided by MonitoringResources.org, but creates an opportunity to expand the capacity of MonitoringResources.org to support enterprise-level monitoring across a variety of taxa and habitats to improve natural resource decision-making at landscape scales.