Long-term environmental monitoring, evaluation, and reporting are fundamental to understanding and documenting changes to core values and assessing the effectiveness of management actions. Monitoring can assist with the identification of new concerns, the prioritization of issues and development of management decisions, and the evaluation of trends over time. Monitoring data also can provide the information and evidence needed to determine what is working and what is not, so that policies and management actions can be adapted if necessary.

Cumulative Effects was developed to enable communities to contribute, house, aggregate, analyze, and visualize a wide range of regional monitoring data, and tell interactive stories with traditional knowledge and western science.

A key intent of this tool is to improve technical collaboration on cumulative effects, and the accessibility of collaboratively generated and trusted data and assessments for decision-makers, for the next seven generations.