Members of the Habitat Assessment and Monitoring Project (HAMP) from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) - Columbia National Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office (NFWCO) met with partners in Lincoln, Nebraska to discuss the upcoming 2008 field season activities.  The HAMP group continued the development of goals and objectives for the project.  Engineers and biologists discussed the requirements and details of integrating biological and physical components of HAMP and engineers presented examples of physical data and results to show the potential for integration opportunities.  This is a fundamental concept of the project and something that has not been done on this scale before for the Missouri River.  In an effort to find useful descriptive metrics, Columbia NFWCO proposed using some measure of mortality as a response variable to assess fish populations and survival in river bends where habitat rehabilitation work has occured.  Nebraska HAMP crews expressed concerns about spatial sample clustering and the group discussed whether samples were biased towards any parts of bends.  Nebraska proposed a stratified random sampling scheme, and Columbia proposed a scheme to distribute sampling effort throughout bends.  HAMP partners that attended the meeting included the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, Army Corps of Engineers, Kansas State University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Service's Ecological Services program.  The HAMP program is intended to monitor constructed shallow water habit projects on the channelized portion of the Missouri River. These projects are engineered and created by the Army Corps of Engineers to meet biological compliance for the federally endangered pallid sturgeon.  This meeting will provide continued guidance and direction for the goals and objectives of HAMP.