How Are the Fish Doing? Development and implementation of sixteen watershed monitoring and adaptive management programs for recovery of Puget Sound Chinook

The Puget Sound Partnership is working with a team of consultants led by Long Live the Kings to develop a performance management system for recovery of Chinook salmon across Puget Sound. With final products due in May 2014, this presentation will discuss the mechanics for implementing the project in sixteen unique watersheds, successes and challenges, and lessons learned for future application and planning. In 1999, Puget Sound Chinook salmon were listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. NOAA-NMFS (the federal agency accountable for the listing) supported authorship of unique watershed chapters by locally-led, collaborative watershed groups comprised of local jurisdictions, tribes, non-profits, state and federal entities and other stakeholders. NOAA completed review in 2007 and adopted the chapters with a supplement acknowledging a missing piece essential to the plan: a regional monitoring and adaptive management framework that would track the adequacy of proposed actions and allow watersheds and the region to review, revise and strengthen their chapters over time. PSP and the LLTK team of consultants are working with 16 local watershed teams of scientists, managers and policy makers to apply the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation approach for translating existing Chinook recovery chapters into a common regional language. Over a year long period, watersheds are identifying components, attributes and indicators for the ecosystem that can be used to characterize the health of Chinook and their habitat, conducting a viability analysis to identify current and future desired status, identifying pressures, and documenting “theories of change” and hypotheses for recovery. Authors will discuss the mechanics of this project and how the outcomes are intended to form the basis of a monitoring and adaptive management system for Chinook salmon recovery in Puget Sound

An Ecosystem Framework for use in Recovery and Management of the Puget Sound Ecosystem: Linking Assessments of Ecosystem Condition to Threats and Management Strategies

The ongoing influx of people to the Puget Sound basin has placed pressure on the ecosystem and contributed to a decline in ecosystem health. The Puget Sound Partnership (Partnership), formed in July 2007, is leading an effort to restore the health of Puget Sound. The Partnership is taking an ecosystem-based approach to management that will, over time, address policy questions associated with multiple interacting ecosystem goals. As a foundation of this approach, indicators of ecosystem condition are used to describe a healthy Puget Sound, to evaluate progress towards meeting the recovery goals, to evaluate and adapt management strategies, and as the basis for reporting back to the public. A portfolio of high-level ecological and human health indicators, “vital signs,” was developed and adopted in 2011. Since then, the indicators have received external review by the WA State Academy of Sciences, scientists, planners, decision-makers, and other stakeholders. In response, the Partnership is evolving its portfolio of indicators in order to provide a broader set of indicators to track progress toward threat reductions and ecosystem recovery. To guide the indicator evolution process, we developed an overall organizing ecosystem framework that is an amalgamation of three frameworks: (1) a generalized “causal chain/network framework” that is used to link drivers and pressures of ecosystem health with (2) a framework for assessment of the condition of Puget Sound’s biophysical system, and (3) a framework for the condition of human well-being (HWB). Assessing a complete array of condition and driver/pressure indicators can aid the analysis of the causal mechanisms underlying compromised ecosystem condition. Moreover, in this framework, HWB is recognized as an outcome of biophysical condition as well as a driver of biophysical condition, and that its many components are differentially affected by and can affect conservation outcomes. This paper will present examples of how the Partnership, working with the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program, is using this ecosystem framework to identify key ecosystem attributes and associated indicators for major ecosystem components. These biophysical condition indicators, along with indicators of key pressures on the system and indicators of HWB, can be used adaptively to track the recovery of Puget Sound

Puget Sound Pressures Assessment -- What stressors most affect Puget Sound recovery and long-term protection? How is this information being used?

The 2014 Puget Sound Pressures Assessment (PSPA) was an effort commissioned by the Puget Sound Partnership’s Science Panel to better understand the stressors on the Sound’s freshwater, marine-nearshore, and terrestrial resources and identify the critical vulnerabilities that should be addressed to ensure sustainable long-term protection and recovery. The assessment rated the vulnerability of 60 ‘endpoints’ – which are discrete species, habitat types, landforms, or ecological processes – to 47 ‘stressors’ – which are the human and natural processes that are the proximate agents for change to the Puget Sound ecosystem. Key findings include: stressors with the most potential for harm and endpoints that are most vulnerable to harm (intrinsic vulnerability), relative uncertainty about stressor-endpoint relationships, current stressor intensity for geographic assessment unit and Sound-wide, and potential impact of stressors at the assessment unit and Sound-wide scales. Two land cover conversion stressors and two non-point pollution stressors are highly rated in both intrinsic vulnerability and potential impact. Throughout 2015 Partnership staff used PSPA findings to update its evaluation of ecosystem recovery processes and communicated PSPA findings to guide a number of entities’ decisions about priority stressors and sources of stress. The Partnership has also begun to use the PSPA findings as the foundation of a climate vulnerability assessment. These uses of the PSPA findings provide insights into some of the benefits provided by the assessment, limitations and challenges in supporting decisions about priority stressors and sources of stress, and the most-pressing improvements to the 2014 effort and products

A pressure taxonomy and pressure network diagrams for Puget Sound ecosystem recovery

Puget Sound ecosystems, species, and human wellbeing are affected by both natural events and human activities. Broadly, these activities and events that ultimately effect change in the ecosystem via a variety of pathways of effect can be called “pressures” or “threats. In its conceptual models of the Puget Sound ecosystem and of ecosystem recovery efforts, the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP) identifies key components of the ecosystem and the pressures that directly threaten these components. We have developed a pressure taxonomy that is intended to support recovery efforts by improving the ability of practitioners, managers, scientists and decision-makers to communicate, coordinate and collaborate more effectively within and across projects. The taxonomy is hierarchical, including three levels of information – pressure categories, pressure classes, and stressors – and examples of how the elements can be combined to describe pathways of effect. By adopting a standard nomenclature and presenting examples of pressure network diagrams, the PSP pressure taxonomy serves as a starting point for describing the multiple pathways of effect of pressures to Puget Sound ecosystems. The taxonomy has guided the development and implementation of the 2014 Puget Sound Pressure Assessment and will help make the results of that assessment useful to others. Ultimately, if all Puget Sound ecosystem recovery partners are able to reference the common taxonomy, we will increase the region’s capacity to assess risks to Puget Sound ecosystems and develop more effective approaches to managing and reducing threats to the Sound

Applying a Common Adaptive Management Framework to Chinook and Ecosystem Recovery in Puget Sound

The Puget Sound Partnership is working closely with the 14 Puget Sound Chinook salmon recovery Lead Entities to develop 16 watershed-scale monitoring and adaptive management frameworks for Chinook salmon recovery, translating local watershed approaches to recovery into a common regional framework. With final products due in May 2014, this presentation will discuss the process being applied to Chinook recovery and potential application for overall Puget Sound ecosystem recovery. Using the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (Open Standards) to guide the process and the technical manual “Puget Sound Chinook Salmon Recovery: A Framework for the Development of Monitoring and Adaptive Management Plans” (draft released by the Recovery Implementation Technical Team in 2013) as the technical basis for characterizing and monitoring ecosystem health, PSP is working with a team of consultants as well as scientists and policy-makers in each of 16 watersheds around Puget Sound to translate existing watershed plans into a common language. Watershed teams are identifying strengths and gaps in existing plans, assessing status and trends of Chinook populations and key habitat components, identifying status and effectiveness monitoring priorities, and documenting adaptive management processes to support use of new information to guide decisions on management and capital expenditures. This project forms the basis of an adaptive management system for Chinook salmon recovery in Puget Sound: it will establish a comprehensive, methodical, effective, and transparent monitoring and adaptive management program for salmon recovery that is incorporated into, and leveraged by, the broader efforts around Puget Sound recovery. Based on the outcomes of applying this approach to Chinook recovery, PSP will evaluate potential application of a similar approach for steelhead recovery planning and comprehensive ecosystem recovery planning with the local integrating organizations (LIOs). This Open Standards-based approach may support prioritizing strategies and actions at the Action Area and LIO level, regional monitoring of status and effectiveness of Near Term Actions (NTAs) included in the Action Agenda, and may also support assessment of which NTAs are likely to be most effective toward meeting our recovery goals