Local or MSRT Comments: OSPIT recommends removing the wetland work on private land and moving to strictly O&M budget. Also recommend removing the work element of pre-acquisition activity.

The ISRP emphasizes that the proponents need to analyze the information they have gathered and are continuing to gather, not create an expensive monitoring program. With this project, there is no necessary conflict between the ISRP and NPCC guidance on project level M&E. There is no need to spend more than 5% of the project budget to produce relevant analyzed monitoring data that index project progress. Projects are required, under review criteria, to provide adequate monitoring and evaluation, and it appears that what this project has been doing could readily address that requirement. There is no apparent need for expanded experimental monitoring; there simply is a need to analyze and think about the information that is available. Further analysis and reporting of relevant data would likely not take as much as two weeks, especially if some analyses are already included in Annual Reports, as the response indicates. In future reports, the results of some data analysis should be shown and their interpretation described to indicate what the project proponents understand the data to tell them about the progress and success of their project; the ISRP should not be referred to annual M&E reports to see what those data show.