We developed a Monitoring and Evaluation Program (M&E Program) for a consortium of federal, state and local institutions in the Lake Tahoe basin. The program customizes our adaptive management system design to establish desired conditions, develop management-targeted conceptual models, collect and report the most valued information, and synthesize results to enable effective decision making.

The M&E Program collects data, analyzes information and reports synthesized results for indicators of environmental and socioeconomic conditions as well as agency performance measures. Indicators provide the ultimate measure to determine if policies and physical actions are having the desired effect on targeted conditions. However, indicators can be challenging to interpret due to external drivers such as precipitation or the long timeframes necessary for systems to respond to agency actions. Performance measures are tracked separately from indicators to provide a measure of the direct output of the programs such as the mass of pollutants reduced. Performance measures and indicators are connected to each other and program goals via management-targeted conceptual models that allow stakeholders to understand how actions are expected to benefit the environmental and socioeconomic system.

We created a variety of program management tools including: an indicator prioritization process, monitoring activity management, an indicator framework, conceptual models, monitoring plans, data management procedures and periodic synthesis reports. We also designed the information systems necessary to implement these tools. These tools, the associated information systems and our adaptive management system allows the M&E Program to efficiently coordinate decentralized resources and support effective, information-based decision making.