Places

Place

Places are locations in the landscape recognized by people

Salish Sea References

• Ecology Shoreline Photography Viewer
• The Encyclopedia of Puget Sound provides a peer reviewed version of the wiki
• PRISM Project Search
• Washington Coastal Atlas
• UW River History Project

Wiki Rules

• Wiki text does not reflect the policy or opinion of any agency or organization
• Please adhere to our Social Contract and Style Guide
• Complain here, and be nice.

WE aim to curate place-based knowledge on this platform. We describe places and several scales. We call the Salish Sea a Bioregion. The largest scale are Regions such as the 2000 square miles of the South Puget Sound, defined by an oceanic sub-basin, Within regions are Catchments like the 720 square mile Nisqually Watershed, but also including islands, peninsulas, or drainages around inlets. Our next scale is Landforms such as deltas, beach drift-cells or coastal stream basins, such as the 635 acre Schneider Creek Watershed. A place may also be a forest stand you are tending. Places are defined by their ecological character. Institutions claim space using invisible lines to define the reach of their power. On the platform we identify areas of institutional interest on Workgroup pages.

A Hierarchy of Scale

Explore the organization of place pages at one of five scales:

• Regions (100s to 1000s of square miles) Regions describe land masses or oceanic subbasins in ways that are commonly discussed, studied or managed by workgroups. There is no perfect division of regions, and the boundaries of regions may be ambiguous.
• Catchments (10s-100s of square miles) Catchments encompasses whole hydrologic systems. A large river watershed, or a collection of watersheds around a marine inlet might define a catchment. Peninsulas and islands may also describe a distinct hydrologic place centered on the terrestrial rather than the aquatic. Large catchments may be subdivided (for example the Category:Skykomish within the).
• Landforms (1s-10s of square miles) Landforms are pieces of a landscape defined by physiographic processes, such as a River Delta, Beach, or a Floodplain reach, or at higher elevation Headwater Tributaries storing snow, in confined valleys.
• Site Scale (10s - 100s of acres) - Sites describe places people do efforts, and may be defined by ownership rather than ecology, although the two may coincide. You can use the wiki to document assessments, designs, or stewardship efforts on your sites.
• Patch Scale (1s - 10s of acres) - Our smallest scale describes patches under management within sites. You can use the wiki to document treatment and monitoring units.

Place Categories

We of often use place pages at the Region or Catchment scale to organize Workgroups, Effort or Products. Jump to a particular place of interest, and see what we have, or contribute your knowledge to a shared permanent archive.

Regions of the Salish Sea

Admiralty Inlet  •  Chehalis River Basin  •  East Sound  •  Gulf Islands  •  Hood Canal  •  San Juan Islands  •  South Puget Sound  •  South Vancouver Island  •  Strait of Juan de Fuca  •  Sunshine Coast  •  West Sound  •  Whidbey Basin

Catchments of the Salish Sea

Bainbridge Island  •  Budd Inlet Ecosystem  •  Deschutes Watershed  •  Dungeness Watershed  •  Henderson Inlet Ecosystem  •  Methow Valley  •  Nisqually River Watershed  •  Nooksack River Watershed  •  Quilcene Bay Watershed  •  Salt Spring Island  •  Skokomish River  •  Snohomish Watershed  •  Stillaguamish River  •  The Samish Watershed  •  Totten Inlet Ecosystem

Landforms

Students of ecosystems are keenly aware how landform describes the structure and processes of a place (See Shipman 2008 or Montgomery 1999). We use seven distinct landforms to describe places, that inform how habitats are formed and sustained, how they are degraded, and how they can be restored. This allows us to compare similar places across landscape. Landform Scale places might combine a couple different landforms, for example, a Place with a lowland watershed enters into an embayment may use both categories. Landform categories are also used to attribute Site and Patch scale places:

Headwaters

Methow Valley

Lowland Watersheds

Anderson Creek Watershed  •  Bear Creek Watershed  •  Big Beef Creek Watershed  •  Butler Cove Watershed  •  Chambers Creek Watershed  •  Cherry Creek Watershed  •  Chico Creek Watershed  •  Clallam River Watershed  •  Decker Creek Watershed  •  Deschutes Watershed  •  Dewatto River Watershed  •  Filucy Bay Ecosystem  •  Fishtrap Creek Watershed  •  French Slough Floodplain and Watershed  •  Goldsborough Creek Watershed  •  Green Cove Creek Watershed  •  Henderson Inlet Ecosystem  •  Hoko River Watershed  •  Indian-Moxlie Creek Watershed  •  Jim Creek Watershed  •  Jimmycomelately Watershed  •  Little Skookum Ecosystem  •  Lower Skagit  •  Mission Creek Watershed  •  Newaukum Creek Watershed  •  Northwest Olympia Watersheds  •  Pilchuck Creek Watershed  •  Pilchuck River Watershed  •  Port Gamble Ecosystem  •  Port Townsend Ecosystem  •  Pysht River Watershed  •  Quilceda Watershed  •  Rendsland Creek Watershed  •  Salt Creek Watershed  •  Scatter Creek Watershed  •  Schneider Creek Watershed  •  Seabeck Creek Watershed  •  Shine Creek Watershed  •  Snow-Salmon Watershed Ecosystem  •  South Whidbey Island  •  Sultan River Watershed  •  Tahuya River Watershed  •  Tarboo Creek Watershed  •  Terrell Creek Watershed  •  Thomas Creek Watershed  •  Union River Watershed  •  West Bay Watersheds  •  Woods Creek Watershed

Floodplains

Cherry Creek Watershed  •  French Slough Floodplain and Watershed  •  Lower Skagit  •  Lower Skykomish Floodplain  •  Lower Snohomish River Floodplain  •  Lower Stillaguamish Floodplain  •  Methow Valley  •  North Fork Nooksack Floodplain  •  North Fork Stillaguamish Floodplain  •  Reiner Farm  •  Reiner Farm/Mother Garden  •  Sammamish River Floodplain  •  Scatter Creek Farm and Conservancy  •  Skokomish Confluence  •  Snohomish Lord Hill Reach  •  South Fork Nooksack Floodplain  •  South Fork Stillaguamish Floodplain  •  Tolt River Floodplain

River Deltas

Deschutes Estuary  •  Diking District 6  •  Dosewallips Delta  •  Duckabush Delta  •  Dungeness Delta  •  Duwamish Delta  •  Ebey Island  •  Elwha Delta  •  Hamma Hamma Delta  •  Lower Skagit  •  Nisqually Delta  •  Nooksack Delta  •  Port Susan Bay Ecosystem  •  Puyallup Delta  •  Quilcene Delta  •  Samish Delta  •  Skagit Delta  •  Skokomish Delta  •  Snohomish Delta  •  Stillaguamish Delta  •  The Marshlands

Embayments

Big Beef Estuary  •  Burley Lagoon Ecosystem  •  Chambers Creek Estuary  •  Chico Creek Estuary  •  Clallam River Estuary  •  Dabob Bay Ecosystem  •  Deer Lagoon  •  Drayton Harbor  •  East Bay  •  Edmonds Marsh Ecosystem  •  Fidalgo Bay Ecosystem  •  Filucy Bay Ecosystem  •  Fisherman's Bay  •  Frye Cove  •  Goldsborough Creek Estuary  •  Henderson Inlet Ecosystem  •  Hoko River Estuary  •  Jimmycomelately Estuary  •  Little Skookum Ecosystem  •  Lynch Cove  •  Padilla Bay  •  Port Angeles Harbor  •  Port Gamble Ecosystem  •  Port Susan Bay Ecosystem  •  Pysht River Estuary  •  Salmon-Snow Coastal Inlet  •  Salt Creek Estuary  •  Sequalitchew Creek Estuary  •  Skookum Inlet  •  Snow-Salmon Watershed Ecosystem  •  South Whidbey Island  •  Tahuya Estuary  •  Titlow Beach

Beaches

Bangor Drift Cell  •  Birch Bay Ecosystem  •  Broad Spit Drift Cell  •  Carkeek to Everett Beach System  •  Cherry Point Driftcell  •  East Dyes Drift Cell  •  East Nooksack Drift Cell  •  Elwha Drift Cell  •  Neill Point East  •  Piner Point West  •  Point Defiance Drift Cell  •  Port Gamble Ecosystem  •  Port Susan Bay Ecosystem  •  Port Townsend Ecosystem  •  SPU 1008  •  SPU 2071  •  SPU 2086  •  SPU 7086  •  South Whidbey Island  •  Teekalet Point  •  Titlow Beach  •  West Camano Drift Cell

Headlands

South Lummi Island Headlands

The Riddle of Overlapping Ecological and Political Geography

We also study and steward places defined by political units. While this may be problematic for many ecological purposes, many Efforts and Products are focused on policy landscapes, so we have a set of attributes to describe these "places", typically using Counties (in the United States) or Districts (In Canada) as our organizing unit. Not surprisingly, Workgroups, Efforts, and Products, are often categorized using county or district categories. However, because of our ecological restoration focus, we rarely synthesize information about counties as "places" and instead recognize them as a kind of Local Government workgroup--or a social system composed of people that has an area of interest. Thus a particular catchment may be associated with a county, and a county workgroup might be identified as operating in several catchments.