Carol Volk received a PhD from the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources in 2004. She was an affiliated Water Center student, and worked with Professor Bob Edmonds. Her PhD dissertation title was "Nutrient and biological responses to red alder (Alnus rubra) presence along headwater streams: Olympic Peninsula, Washington."

Dr. Volk was a Post-Doc with the UW and NOAA-Fisheries (Northwest Fisheries Science Center) working on designing long-term monitoring programs for salmonid ecosystems as part of a group called the Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP). She now consults with NOAA-Fisheries and the Bonneville Power Administration for ISEMP on projects that are a continuation of her post-doc work. Her specific interests are utilizing fish and habitat datasets at multiple spatial scales, program coordination, and data management.

ISEMP, in addition to monitoring salmon and steelhead populations and habitat within pilot basins, is designed to test the robustness of monitoring protocols, indicator metrics, and sampling designs currently used in monitoring programs. ISEMP plans to develop tools to facilitate effective data analysis, management and communication.

An example of an ISEMP project is the Pacific Northwest Salmon Habitat Restoration Project Tracking Database (PNSHP). This project demonstrates a data management strategy that seeks to catalog all the restoration projects that have been implemented in the PNW for as long as there are documentary records, and to make this catalog available for regional data analysis, and therefore useful at a larger scale. The ultimate goal of this research product is to facilitate monitoring of habitat restoration projects that may aide salmon recovery. The database contains information obtained from numerous sources that use various standards of data quality control. The NWFSC has made a reasonable effort to provide verified, accurate data, but evaluation of data quality was not possible for every record. The NWFSC is providing the database to the research community as a research tool. They caution, however, that determining the applicability of the database for any particular use is the sole responsibility of the user.