A Data Exchange Standard for Wadeable Stream Habitat Monitoring Data
The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP) led a working group of four programs to develop a data exchange standard, assess the compatibility of metrics and demonstrate a process of integrating data from wadable streams. Data from wadeable streams collected by monitoring programs are used to assess watershed condition status and trends. Four federally managed programs collect a suite of similar habitat measurements using compatible methods and produce individual program datasets for their prescribed geographic and temporal range. The participating programs are the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) lotic division, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) National Rivers and Streams Assessment (NRSA) survey section, and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management’s Aquatic and Riparian Effectiveness Monitoring Program (AREMP) and PacFish/InFish Biological Opinion Monitoring Program (PIBO MP). Their datasets answer agency-specific management questions and fulfill reporting requirements but the datasets are not released in full, or at all, and in some cases there was no method to integrate data from the four programs to provide data at a larger spatial scale
PNAMP led a working group of experts from the four monitoring programs to determine data compatibility, develop an exchange standard and process to integrate their compatible data. The resulting Stream Habitat Metrics Integration (SHMI) data exchange standard contains a data mapping file used to transform data from the source program data to a conformed format based on a consistent metric controlled vocabulary. After extensive discussions assessing and comparing program methods and analyses, the working group found 26 stream habitat metrics to be sufficiently comparable to be integrated into a meaningful dataset.
Subset compatible data from 14 datasets from four monitoring programs were filtered, transformed, standardized, and combined using R code to create the integrated SHMI dataset containing ~12,000 locations, ~19,000 events, and ~200,000 measurements from 2000 to 2022.
Furthermore, a subset of PIBO MP data previously available only by request and AREMP data available only as a proprietary ESRI ArcGIS geodatabase were made publicly available in non-proprietary formats via the integrated SMHI dataset (Scully and others, 2023a). This report describes the data exchange standard and its development, the metric compatibility assessment, and the data integration process so others may reuse the exchange standards and its components as well as the data integration processes.