Regional Issues

Puget Sound has experienced a renaissance of government and public awareness. The region and its governance are seeking to be proactive in remediating current problems, avoid the fate of degraded environments in other parts of the country, and respond to climate change realities, while promoting the economic growth and well-being of the region.

The overall set of Puget Sound issues and processes is complex. Local, State, Federal and Tribal agencies and non-government agencies have long-standing mandates and actions, each focusing on particular sectors of the environment. The salmon recovery effort under the Shared Strategy worked across organizations. The Hood Canal Dissolved Oxygen Program (HCDOP), for the recovery of Hood Canal, was initiated in 2004, involving an unprecedented cooperation, from individual home owners to 30 organizations.

Building on such efforts, Governor Christine Gregoire formed the initial Puget Sound Partnership, in December 2005, to identify the most important regional problems, and how to develop the overall political process to address these multi-sector issues. After a year of deliberations, the 22-member Partnership concluded in their report Sound Health, Sound Future,-Protecting and Restoring Puget Sound,” that “the dazzling appearance of Puget Sound is deceiving; the numbers of salmon, orcas and many other creatures are at a fraction of historic levels and tell us that our ecosystem is in trouble.” The Partnership advanced an Action Agenda 2020, targeting five top-priority areas. Legislation was passed to support these efforts. Senate Bill 5372, signed in April 2007, created the process for the new Puget Sound Partnership. The Bill recognizes and addresses the key role science must play in shaping and influencing the policy and management activities in Puget Sound, to be carried out through a program that encompasses monitoring, modeling, data management and research, as focused on the major target issues.

To launch this process, an Action Agenda for 2008 is being developed, with the objectives of:

Creating a single set of scientifically-based ecosystem priorities and actions tied to specific sub-regional priorities and actions. The strategies and actions need to include advancements in key issue areas where progress is needed.
Tying strategies and actions to measurable outcomes and benchmarks
Significantly engaging interests and communities during the planning process to help build the long-term support that is needed to sustain a healthy ecosystem.

The initial targets, for targeted implementation by 2008, includes

Toxic loading
Nutrient loadings
Priority locations for nearshore protection and habitat restoration
Evaluation of habitat protection
Stormwater runoff

While the immediate 5 topics are addressed, a longer-term foundation for “ecosystem-based management” will be targeted, with work on developing:

Detailed, quantitative ecosystem assessments in two sub-basins, including Hood Canal and likely South Sound, to provide more specificity about limitations to overall system function and/or sets of actions. These assessments would be a model to use in other parts of Puget Sound.
A food web model to identify numeric targets for outcomes and hone strategies and actions.
A circulation model, ultimately tied to watershed models, to understanding the fate and transport of toxics, nutrients, and pathogens, to help design more effective control and reduction strategies.

These topics and their targets are very comprehensive. They involve multiple disciplines and multiple jurisdictions, and, ultimately, innovative solutions. A particularly relevant issue is that information from one sector is frequently necessary to address an issue within a different sector. PRISM and its partners have been working to combine information from multiple sources, to address these integrated problems. In the process, the aggregate of the work becomes the Virtual Puget Sound.

Modeling and observing Puget Sound has been one of the central pillars of Puget Sound, through the development of the POM and coupled ABC models, and the Thompson cruises and ORCA moorings. POM has been used for multiple purposes, including helping site the outfall of the new sewage treatment plan in the Brightwater project. Current development is working towards operational “24/7” capabilities, in partnership with APL.
Describing the movement of water across the landscape is essential for multiple purposes, from prediction of river stage (including flooding) to computing stormwater and nutrient and toxic loading to the marine environment. Over longer terms, climate change can influence changes in freshwater inputs to the marine environment, with implications for circulation. PRISM has led the application of the DHSVM to short-term forecasts, coupled with the MM5 atmosphere model, and to longer-term climate and landuse implications, in partnership with the Climate Impacts Group. This work then lays the foundation for water resource assessment, initiated by PRISM through the CRYSTAL project, now carried on by CIG. While DHVSM itself describes water movement only, a “Solute Export Model” module, D-SEM, has been developed, through cooperation with HCDOP, describing the processes and pathways of nitrogen and carbon from the land to and through streams to the Sound. This model will be important for future Sound-wide nutrient loading assessments
Nearshore habitat and habitat protection requires knowing first what the basic structure of the topography is.Puget Sound Beaches developed a consistent shoreline and wave model. PRISM is a primary partner in the LIDAR consortium producing very high resolution topography. The next step is to know “what came first.” PRISM has been a partner in the River History project, describing what the Puget lowlands were like. The modern landscape has been described by PRISM through consistent composite LANDSAT imagery, first in Logsdon 1998 (a product used by local agencies, and developed in concert with King County) and subsequently by Alberti 2002. These “data layers” are then incorporated in the integrating models.
With the physical environment being characterized, the stage is set for food web modeling. The SHIRAZ salmon habitat model has been used on Puget Sound rivers to evaluate salmon escapement and potential recovery options. NMFS used SHIRAZ with DHSVM for detailed analyses of the Snohomish basin. PRISM worked with NMFS to begin the data structures for extending SHIRAZ to the marine environment, by using data sets developed by POM. For the classroom, PRISM programmers developed a web-enabled version.
Regional Case Studies - PRISM has played an integral role in the Hood Canal Dissolved Oxygen Program (HCDOP)