The Puget Sound Recovery Implementation Technical Team has released a draft of a NOAA technical memorandum describing frameworks for adaptive management and monitoring of Chinook salmon in Puget Sound. Download the report.
Topics Overview
Regions
Find articles tagged according to regions within the Puget Sound or greater Salish Sea watersheds. This includes the lands from the crests of the Cascade and Olympic mountains to the shores of marine waters extending from the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca east, including the San Juan Islands, and south to Olympia. The marine waters comprise a large, complex estuary that covers an area of\ approximately 2,330 km2, including 4,000 km of shoreline, and is fed by thousands of \ streams and rivers that drain a total land area of about 35,500 km2. On average, Puget Sound south of Admiralty Inlet has a depth of 62.5 m, but ranges to nearly 300 m at its deepest. This depth is the result of relatively recent geologic events, as 10,000 years ago, mile-thick glaciers pushed southward into the basin, carving deep fjords and depositing sediments hundreds of meters thick.
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A recent summary includes information compiled in Winter 2013 by the modeling workgroup of the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP). It describes several ecosystem modeling efforts in the region.
The Salish Sea is also known as the Georgia Basin-Puget Sound watershed. It extends across the U.S.-Canada border, and includes the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Puget Sound Basin, as well as the San Juan Islands (see map).
The name Salish Sea was proposed in 1989 to reflect the entire cross-border ecosystem. Both Washington State and British Columbia voted to officially recognize the name in late 2009. The name honors the importance of the ecosystem to the Coast Salish people, who were the first to live along its shores.
The Encyclopedia of Puget Sound species library now includes a list of species of concern in the Salish Sea watershed. The list was created by Joe Gaydos and Nicholas Brown of the SeaDoc Society, and was released as a paper presented as part of the Proceedings of the 2011 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in Vancouver, BC.
There are many ways of defining the boundaries of the Puget Sound basin. Hydrologic unit codes (HUCs) are nationally standardized divisions that are often used by conservation agencies and national organizations.
An independent review conducted by the Puget Sound Institute is featured in findings by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology that there is currently “no compelling evidence” that humans are the cause for recent trends in declines in dissolved oxygen in Hood Canal.
The Encyclopedia of Puget Sound, in cooperation with the USGS, has developed a list of terrestrial vertebrates occurring within the Puget Sound basin.
The following article was part of a pilot project at the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound in which University of Washington undergraduates working with the Burke Museum created localized accounts for two iconic amphibian species of the Puget Sound region: the Northern Red-legged Frog and the Pacific Chorus Frog. The Northern Red-legged Frog is described here relative to its local behavior, habitat, threats and morphology.