Other Recovery Potential Screening Resources
Besides providing the Recovery Potential Screening (RPS) tools, indicators and methodology, another major purpose of this website is to provide a wide variety of technical information resources that are directly related to RPS. This section of the RPS website houses a variety of informational resources that can help RPS users carry out their screening projects and use the results.
The restoration and recovery literature database is a key-worded and partially annotated collection of over 1600 technical publication citations in one downloadable MS Access file. The contents of this database are citations and annotations of papers that show relationships between specific water or watershed characteristics and their effect on restorability. Many of these papers played a substantial role in providing background information for developing RPS indicators. Because of its special coding, you must download this file and use it locally. Note that your copy of this database is open, enabling you to add new references or key words if desired.
The Scoring Techniques web area provides useful discussions of several alternative approaches to scoring indicators that are not pre-compiled in the national datasets used most often by RPS Tools. This information may be especially useful to anyone who has data relevant to their watershed comparison needs, but needs help deciding what and specifically how to measure.
At the User Support web area are many useful supplements to RPS users. Some are additional tools to help organize and track the screening process. The screening checklist (PDF) (1 pp, 97 K) is a summary of all the steps in the screening process that is formatted to help you track your progress from start to finish during a screening assessment. The indicator selection worksheet (PDF) (2 pp, 131 K) guides a prospective user through a master list of indicators to help them identify the relevant ones before beginning to use the RPS Tool, and the indicator tracking record(5 pp, 16 K) is a spreadsheet developed to ensure that proper metadata for all indicators is compiled and centrally retrievable. Other features of this web area help proper usage of the RPS Tool. In addition to the RPS Tool User Manual, brief papers about RPS rank-ordering, bubble plotting and mapping techniques are available under displaying results. Still other highlights of the User Support web area include Recovery Potential Screening publications and reports, as well as links to other priority-setting sites that are relevant to impaired waters and restorability.