This report describes the logic and design of an effectiveness monitoring program for the Northwest Forest Plan. The program is prospective, providing an early warning of environmental change before irreversible loss has occurred. Monitoring is focused at two resource levels: individual species and specific ecosystem types. Selection of prospective indicators for the status of species or ecosystems is based on the development of conceptual models relating resource change to reliable, early warning signals of change. Ecosystems, such as late seral stage forest communities, are monitored on the basis of critical structural and compositional elements that reflect the state of underlying ecological processes. The assumption is that systems retain their ecological integrity to the extent that key biotic and physical processes are sustained. For species of concern, the design integrates animal populations with their necessary habitat and projects changes in population status by monitoring significant changes in habitat at several spatial scales. Anticipatory forecasting of changes in population status assumes habitat to be a reliable surrogate for direct population measures. A surrogate-based approach requires an active period of model building that relates population to habitat variation to develop robust wildlife relation models. Essential components needed for program implementation, such as data collection, information management, report preparation, and feedback to management, are discussed. This discussion includes recommendations for staffing, funding, and establishing a long-term commitment for a large, interagency monitoring program.

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Long-term monitoring and research projects are essential to understand ecological change and the effectiveness of management activities. An inherent characteristic of long-term projects is the need for consistent data collection over time, requiring rigorous attention to data management and quality assurance. Recent papers have provided broad recommendations for data management; however, practitioners need more detailed guidance and examples. We present general yet detailed guidance for the development of comprehensive, concise, and effective data management for monitoring projects. The guidance is presented as a graded approach, matching the scale of data management to the needs of the organization and the complexity of the project. We address the following topics: roles and responsibilities; consistent and precise data collection; calibration of field crews and instrumentation; management of tabular, photographic, video, and sound data; data completeness and quality; development of metadata; archiving data; and evaluation of existing data from other sources. This guidance will help practitioners execute effective data management, thereby, improving the quality and usability of data for meeting project objectives as well as broader meta-analysis and macrosystem ecology research.

Late-successional and old-growth forest effectiveness monitoring plan for the Northwest Forest Plan. Gen. Tech. Rep.

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