"Produced by the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program's Salmonid Work Group." -- Cover. "The Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP) is a collaboration of monitoring professionals, researchers, and data users from state, federal, tribal, local government agencies, watershed groups, business, and private volunteer groups. Funded under a USEPA Interagency Agreement with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-149).

The Puget Sound Partnership is leading efforts to develop and implement the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP). PSEMP is designed to leverage existing monitoring to support data collection, management, analysis, and reporting. PSEMP functions to identify monitoring gaps and proposes new monitoring to address gaps. The Federal Caucus approved this assessment of monitoring of viable salmonid population (VSP) criteria to determine the quality of listed salmon and steelhead population abundance, productivity, distribution, and diversity estimates and protocols. Fifteen sub-regional meetings were held in 2011 with tribal and state fisheries field staff and local partners actively assisting in monitoring fish. Over 80 field biologists contributed information about how, when, where, and who collects, processes, and interprets VSP and related hatchery information. The assessment provided an inventory of ongoing VSP, and related hatchery effectiveness monitoring; an evaluation of data quality and certainty; and data improvement actions needed to fill high priority gaps. The analysis was scored based on how well the information approached the recommended monitoring standards in the NOAA Guidance. The maximum possible score was 120.