Using Projects to manage monitoring and other stewardship

The most common way to track monitoring in Landscape is to use one recurring task linked to each portfolio record you need to monitor, as described here and here.

However, some organizations have more comprehensive monitoring workflows that they like to track, with multiple tasks that need to be accomplished and checked off each monitoring season (Review prior monitoring documentation; perform site visit; generate report, etc.). For this workflow, we recommend creating a project for each site you need to monitor, and tracking your overall progress using the 'Projects' tab and the filtering tool you find there. This workflow can also be applied to other stewardship-related projects, like performing a trail or sign inventory for each of your properties.

It is recommended that you choose one workflow or the other to manage your monitoring - either projects or a single 'Annual Monitoring' repeating task - not both. Although you may wish to have a repeating 'Create Monitoring Project' task within these records to remind you to create the projects.

The benefit of using this project-centered workflow is that it gives you a space to track multiple tasks, budgets, as well as funding associated with these activities. The drawback is that these projects cannot be set to automatically recur, and you can't use repeating tasks in a project, so you'll need to create your monitoring projects at the beginning of each monitoring season. Luckily Landscape makes it easy to do so!

Setting up these projects involves the following steps.

1. Create the appropriate project type for tracking these projects.
2. Create your task lists and/or budgets.
3. Use data viewer to filter out the Portfolio Records you want to create the projects for.
4. Create the projects using the bulk update tool in Data Viewer

Steps 1 and 2 only need to be performed once. After that, you'll use the same settings every year.

Here's a video that walks you through each of these steps: