The District’s monitoring program includes a variety of data collection activities including stream temperature, soil quality, water quality, stream flow, and fish habitat. This data collection is essential to understand trends in water quality and how to better manage fish habitat in the District’s watersheds. In addition, included in this section are results of field trials and area-wide data sets such as pebble count records and photo point monitoring sites.

The District’s monitoring program utilizes labor from District staff and volunteers. Funding is often limited, so data collection efforts increase when funding is available. The majority of our data is collected for educational purposes, to establish priorities, and to evaluate the effectiveness of conservation measures in meeting identified standards. The District has been involved in various levels of data collection efforts since the early 1980s. We recently completed an effort to consolidate and make available historic data as well as current data through this web page. Be cautious in using this data as some of the data was collected prior to established monitoring protocols and the District cannot guarantee data accuracy or consistency. See our data disclaimer message below.

For data collection efforts since 2009, the District compiled a set of standard operating procedures for specific monitoring purposes. Prior to this timeframe monitoring procedures were not well documented. If a written procedure was available it is included with the historic data set. The District intends to migrate toward utilization of the Monitoring Methods website as a tool to document and share information about our protocols and methods.

The following provides a list of our procedures:

• Protocol for Deployment and Retrieval of Stream Temperature Monitoring Gages within the Nez Perce Soil and Water Conservation District - 2013
• Turbidity Field Measurement Standard Operating Procedure - 2013

In 2012, the District converted historic data sets to a digital format in order to make these available to end users. This effort was completed due to the numerous requests for current and historic data sets and the high amount of District time and cost required to respond to each of these individual requests. Through this effort we have provided historic data sets as links on this web site and current data sets are housed at data repositories. As new data is reviewed and validated, it will be posted to this web page and/or to the identified data repository. It is our intent to eventually store all of our available data sets on regional websites. For cost control reasons, our data sets are only available through this web site or at the identified data repositories such as StreamNet. Specific data repositories are noted when applicable.

The Nez Perce Soil and Water Conservation District provides monitoring information on an “AS IS” basis. The burden for the fitness of the data relies completely with the user.