Places

From Salish Sea Wiki
Revision as of 22:21, 16 July 2015 by Pcereghino (talk | contribs)


Place Icon.jpg

Place

Places are locations in the landscape recognized by people

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Link to List of Workgroups Link to List of Topics Link to List of Places

Link to List of Efforts Link to List of Products Link to List of Documents Link to List of Graphics Link to List of Websites

Link to Headwater Sites Link to Lowland Watershed Sites Link to Floodplain Sites Link to Delta Sites Link to Embayment Sites Link to Beach Sites Link to Rocky Headland Sites

A diagram from PCereghino describing the hierarchies of place around his home in the Henderson Inlet Watershed

Places are locations as known by people. They can be large political boundaries like counties or Water Resource Inventory Areas (WRIAs). They can be regions like South Puget Sound or Budd Inlet that contain a mix of beaches, embayments and deltas. Or they may be small locations within an ecosystem site, although we suggest that to keep the wiki orderly that we not include many places smaller than a site. There are places within places within places. To try to organize the wiki, we propose a hierarchy of places.

A Hierarchy of Places[edit]

At the largest scale, the Salish Sea can be divided into sub-basins. Within a sub-basin, the landscape can be divided into the large river watersheds, and their associated estuaries. However this leaves most of the shoreline "unnamed". Another feature that we name are the large Bays, Ports and Harbors, that within them may have a mix of beaches and embayments. This still leaves more exposed reaches of shoreline, mostly beach drift cells with smaller estuaries and embayments embedded therein.

In the wiki, there is a special scale, called a Site, which is used to describe a human scale, relatively cohesive ecological unit, at the scale of the geomorphic processes that form and sustain habitat structure. This site scale is provided as a kind of anchor point, to identify places based on the minimum scale at which a place is best studied, understood, and managed. All these concepts can and should evolve as we get wiser about ecosystem management.

Political boundaries sometimes align well with ecological systems, and sometimes poorly. The effects of the mismatch between political lines and ecological places is complex. There is a page developing around jurisdictions.

Places in the Salish Sea[edit]

Categories describing place[edit]