Good Morning.

• I'm Jeff Koenings, Director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Co-chair of the Governor's Monitoring Forum and all around good guy!

• Welcome to this second meeting of the Governor's Forum on Monitoring Watershed Health and Salmon Recovery and a special welcome to the other new boss of the forum. You might stand and introduce yourself.

This forum was created by executive order in 2004 to help develop a coordinated monitoring strategy that answers two basic questions:

• Are we making progress in protecting and restoring our watersheds?

• And are these efforts benefiting the salmon and other species that live in those watersheds?

Finding answers to these questions is critical to recovery efforts throughout the state.

• Scientists, biologists and regulators need to know what's working and what isn't.

• Politicians, tribal leaders, government officials and taxpayers want to know what they're getting for the money they're spending on these efforts.

The questions are simple but - as you well know - the answers are not.

• Developing useful, scientifically valid answers to questions about complex ecological interactions is a daunting - and expensive - task.

BUT, thanks to the work of many of you here today, we have made significant progress in monitoring our watersheds and the species that depend on them.

Bruce Crawford, working in partnership with the SRFB and with state and federal agencies, has recently helped launch two major initiatives:

• Intensively Monitored Watersheds (IMWs), which will link the effects of restoration projects and land-use actions to changes in salmon productivity. IMWs essentially answer the question: "Is restoration creating more fish and more productive watersheds"?

• And Effectiveness Monitoring for SRFB projects, which address the question of how SRFB and other restoration e.g. LIP, RFEG projects are working to improve local conditions. Are they doing what they are supposed to be doing?

Bruce and his partners have also proposed a statewide Status and Trend monitoring approach, which builds on the State of the Salmon report and has helped facilitate our discussion today.

• Clearly, a lot of thought has been given to WHAT to monitor, but there has been little opportunity for everyone to sit down in the same room and discuss how we might help each other be successful.

• As I see it, there's no time like right now!

Much of the Forum's work over the next year will focus on coordinating work funded by the SRFB with other very important ongoing monitoring efforts and needs of local communities.

• Local groups, which have managed hundreds of SRFB, RFEG, and LIP funded projects over the past 5 years, can bring a lot to the table.

• They, too, have been actively engaged in monitoring their success and have identified clear needs in developing universal protocols for monitoring salmon-recovery plans and watershed restoration efforts.

• THIS is where it all comes together and we need your advice, council and experiences to do it.

• Just as we recognize that salmon recovery depends in large part on the will of local communities, salmon recovery and watershed health monitoring will also rely on local community participation.

We all have a lot of work to do before we'll have a monitoring strategy that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

• Clearly, we must chart a course that maintains our relationship with the federal and state governments, so they continue to fund restoration.

• But we also need to build a monitoring strategy that recognizes the needs and capabilities of everyone involved - from the federal government to the local communities.

We have two immediate tasks.

• First, we must improve the State of the Salmon Report, which serves as a report card to our federal and state government partners about "how we are doing".

  We can do this by improving the SOS indicators, and by understanding how current-monitoring activities - IMW and project effectiveness - will contribute to meeting our reporting requirements.

  We will be talking about the SOS later this morning.

• The second task - and the focus of today's meeting - is to begin to build a framework that will ultimately lead to a coordinated statewide monitoring plan.

  This plan will connect monitoring activities and needs at the local level with the activities and needs of local, state and federal governments like NOAA and EPA.

  The plan will also identify the role that each partner will play and how that group can come to meet its own needs for information.

  Today is a significant step to building this plan.

What can we expect for our efforts?

• I see local groups and citizen scientists working with state and federal scientists to collect information about the state of Washington watersheds.

  This information would provide some of the critical feedback to partners at all levels of government and communities committed to improving the quality of life in Washington State.

• I can also envision, this information being rolled up from the local watersheds to become part of a new more information rich invigorated SOS report.

Today is just the first step in this journey.

• It's not going to be easy, and there are bound to be some disagreements along the way.

• But I do believe we'll get there, so long as we all keep our eyes on the prize.

Thanks for coming and good luck.