Welcome to Salish Sea Restoration
The Salish Sea, including Puget Sound as its southern extent, is a rich maritime ecosystem of global signficance. The stewardship of this ecosytem is in the hands of the people that live in it.
This site helps agencies, citizens and scientists share information about restoration of ecosystems--a shared journal that uses the traditions of the scientific method as its social contract. We connect people to other people working in similar places or on similar issues, and promote coordination and transparency in our research and management efforts.
We invite you to join us.
Our Ecosystems Framework
We divide the landscape into seven kinds of systems, each relatively consistent in ther physical dynamics, and how we use them. The salish sea is a mosaic of these sites:
Our Human Systems Framework
We also wanted to capture the activites and interests of people. The way people think and organize themselves often transcends ecological place. We organize ouselves into workgroups which undertake efforts using shared resources often resulting in development of documents, which add to our understanding of topics. The following page categories describe this landscape of human knowledge.
Our goal is to increase transparent interaction between ecosystem scientists, private citizens, and public servants. This wiki allows you to stitch together existing sources, into a coherent whole story, to break down barriers to information movement common to our institutions and busy lives.
Scientists engage with the practice of restoration and protection
Scientists oftens have very specialized areas of knowledge, only shared among close colleagues. Ecosystem management both provides the opportunty for on-the-ground experiments (AKA adaptive management), but also requires interdisciplary understanding of complex systems. Without the discipline of science, ecosystem management becomes less effective, less efficient, and more focussed on economic and political interests. Scientists can use this wiki in several ways:
- Identify sites where you have specific knowledge or information.
- Report your contributions, and encourage students to contribute project work and liturature review that strengthens and synthesizes our understanding of systems and their attributes.
- Find on-the-ground efforts that align with your research goals that could benefit from scientific involvement while providing large scale experiments to test ecological postulates.
Citizens take ownership of ecosystem stewardship
Citizens are the true cornerstone of conservation, but volunteers, advocates and neighbors are working by their bootstraps to develop the networks and strategies for their local situation. There are many ways that this wiki can help citizens become more effectively engaged:
- Learn about what has been written about your ecosystem site.
- Identify workgroups that are actively working in your site, or in similar systems to improve your networks.
- Report on your workgroup and its efforts so that others are aware of your stewardship.
A vast volume of information generated through publically funding work doesn't get shared. Projects, reports, observations are buried in unpublished "grey literature", or in the memories of agency staff. When this information doesn't get added to our collective knowledge, we are wasting resources. Professionals working for various governments or their consultants can both contribute and benefit from the wiki:
- Post documents that might otherwise be hard to find, either associated with a particular site or more generally related to systems
- Identify local workgroups or documents at sites where you find yourself working.
- Contribute to maintaining shared knowledge of systems and their attributes fitting to you expertise.
