CHaMP metrics (Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program)

The goal of CHaMP is to generate and implement a standard set of fish habitat monitoring (status and trend) methods in up to 26 watersheds across the Columbia River basin. The watersheds have been chosen to maximize the contrast in current habitat conditions and also represent a temporal gradient of expected change in condition through planned habitat actions. Surveys will be conducted in watersheds with perceived large juvenile life-stage survival gaps due to habitat impairments or that are home to existing high quality fish monitoring infrastructure. CHaMP implementation will occur on the spatial scale of the Technical Recovery Team (TRT) populations with the intention for inference on habitat quality and quantity at the fish population level. CHaMP is being built around a single habitat monitoring protocol with a program-wide approach to data collection and management. CHaMP metric data set consists of the entire suite of measurements described in the 2012 CHaMP protocol. A three-person crew surveys the topography (both the in-channel bathymetry and out-of-channel topography including the near channel floodplain) at a site and collects auxiliary data at both the channel unit scale (fish cover estimates, large woody debris, ocular estimate of substrate, pebble counts of bed material in riffles, pool tail fines, and undercut banks) and the site level scale (macroinvertebrate drift, discharge, solar input, riparian structure, alkalinity, conductivity, photographs, and water and air temperature loggers). The crews post process the data collected at each of the sites, which entails a QC of the survey point data, importing the survey point data into ArcGIS and converting the points into a TIN, and converting the topographic TIN to a DEM. Additional GIS products are also produced during the post-processing and include a water surface TIN, water surface DEM, and water depth raster.