What is natural in the Puget Sound Ecosystem? Establishing baseline conditions and identifying ecological indicators

Timothy Essington, Charles Simenstad
University of Washington
$34,786

Although human activity has impinged on the Puget Sound ecosystem for years, we have limited understanding about the long-term dynamics of this ecosystem and the roles of human activity therein. This fundamental lack of understanding is now widely acknowledged to be a major impediment to restoring Puget Sound. We seek to collect, organize, and analyze all of the environmental data collected in Puget Sound over the past century, evaluate the cumulative impacts of human activities on this ecosystem, and identify indicator species that can be used to monitor the effectiveness of restoration efforts. This goal is an ambitious one requiring several years of research. Here we aim to initiate the first phase of this endeavor, which will not only provide the essential foundation for our overall goal, but will also produce tangible products that can immediately be used to develop recovery plans. The objectives of this proposal are to (1) Compile and digitize all possible data on the Puget Sound fish community; (2) Evaluate the data quality for putative “sentinel species” that might serve as ecosystem indicators; (3) Quantitatively analyze the long-term trends in putative indicator species. We focus on the fish community for the simple reason that there is an exceptional amount of data collected on fish and fisheries in Puget Sound. This proposed research builds on the rich legacy of environmental research conducted within Puget Sound, but offers the novel advances that only a research synthesis can provide. We argue that now is an ideal time for a research synthesis and that SeaDoc is poised to be a leader in this effort. The explicit focus of the SeaDoc society to address the “health, recovery, and sustainability of declining marine wildlife populations” is timely given Washington Governer Gregoire’s goal of preserving and recovering the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem. The Puget Sound Partnership has also specifically identified the need to understand natural basline conditions to meet the Governor’s goal. Moreover, we have the technical and analytical skills and an abundance of historical data to answer key questions needed to successfully implement recovery and protection plans. Thus, we are at an ideal confluence of needs and means to identify the baseline conditions of the Puget Sound biota and to understand how human activity has changed those conditions.