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An audio recording of an early morning soundscape on Treasure Island in Puget Sound. 

The following fact sheet represents economic and environmental activities of major ports in the Puget Sound region. This is a living document and may be updated as new information becomes available. 

This document was prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service. Download the entire report, or read the Introduction below. Portions of this document were originally published in June 2013 and were updated in February 2014.  Citation: Curran, C.A., Magirl, C.S., and Duda, J.J., 2014, Suspended-sediment concentrations during dam decommissioning in the Elwha River, Washington: U.S. Geological Survey Data Set, doi:10.5066/F7M043DB. 

The following descriptions of fishing communities in Puget Sound are taken from the 2007 document NOAA Technical Memorandum: Community Profiles for West Coast and North Pacific Fisheries. 

This report, published in 2008 by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, summarizes the economic importance of Washington fisheries using data from 2006. The report's Executive Summary is reprinted below, followed by summaries of data specific to Puget Sound.

This paper uses water quality data to examine the relationship between environmental condition and recreational use of parks in Puget Sound.

Audio recordings of the Mazama Pocket Gopher.

Once a month, Washington State Department of Ecology marine scientists take to the air to obtain high-resolution aerial photo observations and gather water data at the agency's monitoring stations and via state ferry transects. This provides a visual picture of the health of Puget Sound, which they call Eyes Over Puget Sound or EOPS.

A new paper by Puget Sound area scientists from the SeaDoc Society and their collaborators represents the most complete summary to date of killer whale (Orcinus orca) strandings in the North Pacific. The authors analyzed stranding records dating back to 1925, obtained from scientists worldwide, finding that very few whales are stranded (an average of ten a year over the last twenty ye...

A June 19, 2013 paper in the journal PLoS ONE hypothesizes that regional declines in Western Grebe populations may be related to decreasing numbers of forage fish. Using citizen science data from 36 years of bird counts, researchers were able to look at population trends up and down the entire West Coast, finding that abundance of grebes decreased in the Salish Sea but increased in southern California. North American population declined by 52% overall.