Salmonid Field Protocols Handbook: Techniques for Assessing Status and Trends in Salmon and Trout

Data Management: From Field Collection to Regional Sharing

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569926.ch4

This chapter has been written in two parts. Part I covers field data collection and emphasizes working with local-scale, observation-based data; it frames key data concepts and structures that allow local data to be connected subsequently with larger, distributed regional data systems. Part II deals with regional data sharing and focuses on the features of an effective network of regional data centers; the function of these centers is the generation, repository, and dissemination of data as a resource to people and organizations interested in regionwide, national, international, and global natural resource issues.

The purpose of collecting any data is to help answer a question! Thus, developing and using protocols may result in a data-rich endeavor; however, this is not a guarantee that the necessary information will be available to answer a local or regional question(s). With the Information Age upon us, technology plays a large and important role in gathering, compiling, and synthesizing data. Today’s issues and their complexities may potentially overwhelm resource managers in a sea of data; yet when resource agencies are presented with a concern or issue, managers may find themselves confronting a lack of information. The need to analyze data over time and space today requires an increased use of technologies, including their integration into research and monitoring studies as well as evaluation strategies. Resource managers must understand that data standards and protocols help refine the quality of data being collected, enhance its usability, and clarify its purpose. Without standards and protocols, resource managers will have only disparate data sets that contain various kinds of information to answer increasingly more complex questions at various scales (e.g., site, watershed, subbasin, and basin levels).

To this end, fishery managers face an urgent need to standardize information; postponing it only exacerbates the problems. Managers need high-quality, real-time data that can be shared by others. As our data management capabilities expand in unexpected ways from year to year, practitioners face the tremendous challenge of keeping up with what’s available; broadening our horizons to consider new ways to manage data can be daunting, but we have to rise to the challenge. More than ever, emerging technologies are outgrowing old templates. Certainly we have abundant material on data collection at the local level, but our technology permits us to go beyond the local to the regional and global scales. This essay confronts the necessity of collecting field data along with creating designs for regional data structures and explicit management questions; it may also enlighten us as to how we can create international legislation to foster global data management systems.