Database for Forest Plan Monitoring Guide
REY FARVE, Project Leader

Forest and Regions are expected to provide data on their monitoring activities to populate various reports/databases that track/report cost, assignments, and schedules. Monitoring data is reported and tracked in various corporate databases, such as: FACTS (Forest Service Activity Tracking System), NRIS (Natural Resource Information System), IMPP (Inventory and Monitoring Program Planning), and WPS (WorkPlan System).

Additionally, USFS regulations require Regions/Forest to periodically evaluate and monitor their Forest Plans. They are required to prepare annual monitoring evaluation reports to address some components of the Forest Plan, and a comprehensive Monitoring and Evaluation report is prepared as a result of a 5-year review to address the entire Forest Plan.

The objective of this proposal was to develop a tool to link and "mine" the various databases that are used to track and report monitoring of Forest Plans. Work on this project was discontinued as requested by the Inventory & Monitoring Steering Committee (see status below).

Status: Progress on this project since August 2005 was reported to the I&M Steering Committee at its annual meeting in March 2006. The Committee decided that since a similar, parallel effort was being undertaken by the recently established Monitoring and Evaluation Team (MET) that the SDTDC should discontinue further work and package the results for submission to the MET. SDTDC and R9 presented its findings to the MET in June 2006.