Sponsor
Funding for this manuscript was provided by the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund via the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board to Oregon's IMST.
Published In
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2015
Subjects
Natural resources -- Management, Environmental monitoring -- International cooperation -- Evaluation, Environmental monitoring -- Methodology -- Analysis
Abstract
Increasingly, natural resource management agencies and nongovernmental organizations are sharing monitoring data across geographic and jurisdictional boundaries. Doing so improves their abilities to assess local-, regional-, and landscape-level environmental conditions, particularly status and trends, and to improve their ability to make short-and long-term management decisions. Status monitoring assesses the current condition of a population or environmental condition across an area. Monitoring for trends aims at monitoring changes in populations or environmental condition through time. We wrote this paper to inform agency and nongovernmental organization managers, analysts, and consultants regarding the kinds of environmental data that can be combined with suitable techniques and statistically aggregated for new assessments. By doing so, they can increase the (1) use of available data and (2) the validity and reliability of the assessments. Increased awareness of the difficulties inherent in combining and aggregating data for local-and regional-level analyses can increase the likelihood that future monitoring efforts will be modified and/or planned to accommodate data from multiple sources.
Rights
To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf.
The published article is copyrighted by Springer and can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4504-8
DOI
10.1007/s10661-015-4504-8
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/16013
Citation Details
Maas-Hebner, K. G., Harte, M. J., Molina, N., Hughes, R. M., Schreck, C., & Yeakley, J. A. (2015). Combining and aggregating environmental data for status and trend assessments: challenges and approaches. Environmental monitoring and assessment, 187(5), 1-16, 278.