See minutes (140k PDF)

Northwest Environmental Data Network Meeting

October 4, 2006, 9:00 - 4:00

Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission
729 NE Oregon St, Suite 200
Portland, Oregon
503-238-0667

Logistics

Participants need to sign-in with the receptionist on the 2nd Floor who will direct you to the meeting room. Some parking is available at CRITFC, however you will need to obtain a parking card from the receptionist and display it in your vehicle.

To dial into the bridge, all participants should dial 503-230-5566, then any time during or after the message and the double beep, enter 1967#. The maximum number of callers is 15. If you need more call x5050. The system will not allow access into the bridge until 5 minutes before the start time of your conference. Callers can mute or unmute their lines by pressing *6

A. NED agenda items

1. Introductions (10 minutes)
    
2. Short updates from workgroup leads (30 minutes)

• Riparian, Upland and Aquatic Habitat Work Group (Tom O'Neil)
• Water Quality - (David Tetta)
• Subbasin Data (Phil Roger and Peter Paquet)
• Technology for Data Discovery and Sharing (Tom Pansky)
• Project Description & Performance/Temporal & Spatial (Joy Paulus) - PNAMP comments on Best Practices for Reporting Locational and Time Related Data.
• Salmonid Data (Stewart Toshach).

3. Development of NED proposal (30k PDF), to the Council, for regional level pilot or prototype efforts. (60 min). Peter Paquet, David Tetta, Phil Roger, Tom Pansky and Stewart Toshach met on 9/19 and will report on their findings and next steps.

   We have also developed the following schedule to complete this task:

   10/10 at NPCC, 9:00 to noon
   10/19 if needed, time and place TBD
   11/1 at NPCC during regular NED meeting
    

4. Consideration of comments on: Best Practices for Data Dictionary Definitions and Usage and Check List for Organizing Field Collection and Management of Data. (15 min)
    
5. Other work items/updates

• CBFWA - StreamNet Review
• Using the List Serve to comment on NED document/s
• International Columbia River Basin Center of Knowledge
• OFWIM Conference
• Fed Caucus Data Needs

B. PNAMP data management agenda items (30 minutes)

1. Inventory Task update
2. PNAMP Scientific Data Analyst
3. Protocol manager
4. Other PNAMP data management business

C. Afternoon session (1-4pm)

NED Workshop: Use of EPA Distributed Data Base Management
Technology to Collect and Distribute Habitat, Fish and Water quality Data

Guests: Karl Jacobs and Liz Cook from the California Department of Water Resources. (If travel can be arranged Karl and Liz will join us in person. Otherwise they will join us via the conference call).

Background:

Phase III of the NED work plan is to investigate what it will take to migrate towards the use of Distributed approaches and technologies for collecting and distributing data.

Our Guest Speaker:

Karl Jacobs and Liz Cook work on distributed data base development and deployment with the California Department of Water Resources which is a current recipient of a Challenge Grant from the EPA - to collect water resources information and some habitat information, much of it in the San Francisco Bay area, using the exchange network approach. For some more information on the work that Karl and Liz are doing with the Bay Delta and Tributaries Project - see http://bdat.ca.gov/

Karl and Liz will help us host a workshop to identify what the practical steps are and share their experience on what it actually takes to develop and set up a distributed approach. See presentation (2mb PowerPoint).

NED interest:

NED has an interest in exploring the use of DDBMS systems. In addition, the EPA exchange network has grants available to support pilot level efforts to apply the EPA exchange technology and we want to discuss this. Information about the grants is available here, and see the example application (2.5mb PDF) prepared by the California Department of Water Resources 2005 Exchange Network

Agenda

1:00 Introductions and Purpose.

1:15 Application of DDBMS to data collection and sharing - what steps, skills and resources are needed to develop and complete a pilot level project. An important task in this regard is developing translation type tools, or schema, that will facilitate the use of web services as a way of implementing DDBMS for biologic and habitat data - and this is one of EPA's priorities for funding network grants this year.

2:30 EPA initiatives to develop templates for habitat and fishery data.

3:00 How can a pilot be developed for the Pacific Northwest? Who would the main participants be? What entity would have responsibility for managing the server? Who can sponsor an application? Who would be the main author for an application to the EPA? What consensus is needed to move forward?

3:30 Wrap up and next steps. Are we ready to work together on an application for a Pacific North West pilot effort to demonstrate collection and distribution of fishery and habitat data? Should we also pursue other sources of funding?

4:00 Adjourn.