Places

From Salish Sea Wiki


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Place

Places are locations in the landscape recognized by people

Wiki Rules


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 Delta Sites Link to Embayment Sites Link to Beach Sites Link to Rocky Headland Sites

Link to Headwater Sites Link to Lowland Watershed Sites Link to Floodplain Sites

A diagram from Pcereghino showing a schematic relationship among possible places in the Snohomish Basin

Collecting place-based knowledge is one of the central functions of this platform. Places may be large, like the 2000 square miles of the South Puget Sound Basin, or small, like the 635 acre Schneider Creek Watershed, or smaller still, such as a individual planting site. Some places are defined by their ecological character, like watersheds or beach systems, while others are defined by social systems, like a county or a drainage district. In many case we gather information about places within places within places. To create a coherent collection of information about places is to have some clear shared language about places.

A Hierarchy of Scale

To help organize all our places, each Place Page is categorized to one of five scales:

  • Regional Scale (100s of square miles) Regions describe land masses or large basins in ways that are commonly discussed studied or managed by various workgroups. There is no perfect division of regions.
  • Catchment Scale (10s-100s of square miles) Catchment Scale typically encompasses whole hydrologic systems. A large river watershed, or a collection of watersheds around a marine inlet might define a catchment scale unit. 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).
  • Landform Scale (1s-10s of square miles) Landform Scale describes square miles to tens of square miles, and usually defines an individual landform, or an adjacent cluster of related landforms such as River Deltas, Beach Drift Cells, or in higher elevation Headwater Tributaries with snow storage, and confined valleys. Landforms encompass the area of the physiographic processes that form and sustain the character of habitats.
  • Site Scale (10s - 100s of acres) - Sites describe places people do efforts, often 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.

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 categories are generally used as attributes for place pages at the Landform, Site, and Patch scales, organized below from headwaters to marine headlands:

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

The Riddle of Political Geography

We also study and steward places defined by political units. While this is often problematic for many ecological purposes, many Efforts and Products are focused on political landscapes, so we have a set of attributes to describe these landscapes, 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 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.

Places in the Salish Sea and Surrounding Lands

The following pages all use the "place" category at various scales:

Landform Scale - Watersheds

Patch Scale Places


Categories describing place

Place
Salish Sea


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This page was last edited on 18 April 2024, at 00:30.
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