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) (see: http://fsweb.wo.fs.fed.us/em/nfma/met_index.htm) 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.