Advanced Search

The Puget Sound Partnership (PSP) is charged with the task of reversing the decline in the ecological condition of Puget Sound and restoring its health by 2020 (Puget Sound Partnership 2008a). Since the creation of the PSP and the publication of the Puget Sound Partnership Action Agenda, the Puget Sound ecosystem has become a national example of implementation of ecosystem-based ...

The charge is clear: restore the ecological health of Puget Sound by 2020. What is less clear, however, is what future the citizens of the Puget Sound region desire. Understanding what future we want, and what futures are possible, is critical to informing management decisions about complex systems such as Puget Sound, comprised of multiple unpredictable components. The theme of any i...

1. Background What are ecosystem indicators and why are they useful? Ecosystem indicators are quantitative biological, chemical, physical, social, or economic measurements that serve as proxies of the conditions of attributes of natural and socio-economic systems (Environmental Protection Agency 2008, Kurtz et al. 2001, Landres et al. 1988, Fleishman and Murph...

1. Indicator selection and organization We began our evaluation of indicators by compiling a list of available indicators. To build on previous efforts, we selected indicators from three sources: a 2008 report titled, “Environmental Indicators for the Puget Sound Partnership: A Regional Effort to Select Provisional Indicators (Phase 1);” the PSP Action Agenda; and the 2...

Detailed spreadsheets showing the results of the indicator evaluation are available at the following link: Indicator Evaluation Spreadsheets. Summary tables are included at the end of this section. Following the framework outlined in Section 3, we organize the results of the evaluation by PSP ecosystem goals (i.e. Species, Habitat, Food Webs, Water Quality, and Water Quantity). E...

This version of the Puget Sound Science Update provides an initial evaluation of species indicators, but is not intended to be comprehensive. Focal species identified by O’Neill et al. (2008) were evaluated as either measures of population size or population condition. Many of these were identified as potentially good species indicators, and several may be relevant to key attributes...

This version of the Puget Sound Science Update provides an initial evaluation of food web indicators, but is not intended to be comprehensive. Highlights include the evaluation of individual species or species complexes as food web indicators due to their key functional roles (e.g., forage fish, jellyfish), and the identification of existing data sources for assessing food web struc...

This version of the Puget Sound Science Update provides an initial evaluation of habitat indicators, but is not intended to be comprehensive. Highlights include evaluation of marine and interface habitats (area and condition), as well as evaluation of a number of indicators of freshwater and terrestrial habitats condition. Many measures of habitat condition, especially those relatin...

Recently the PSP listed several contaminants of concern for Puget Sound organized into four general categories including toxics, nutrients, pathogens, and other (i.e. deviations in physical/chemical state of a water body; Puget Sound Partnership 2008b). Specific issues related to these categories, including discussions on several chemicals of concern, have been detailed therein and ...

There are over seventy USGS gauging stations on unregulated rivers and streams in Puget Sound, which are continuously collecting streamflow data. There are over 170 specific metrics that can be used to evaluate different aspects of streamflow. In order to determine which of these is most suitable for Puget Sound, we performed a review of the literature to determine salient managemen...