Places

From Salish Sea Wiki


Place Icon.jpg

Place

Places are locations in the landscape recognized by people

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


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

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


A Hierarchy of Scale

To help organize all our places, each place is assigned one of five scales. This lets us find all places of a similar scale. Places also have other attributes.

  • Regional Scale (100s of square miles) We have divided the Salish Sea and surrounding lands into a set of regions, typically encompassing hundreds of square miles. These regions represent ways that are commonly discussed studied or managed by various workgroups. There is no perfect division of regions, and so some of our regions overlap.
  • Catchment Scale (10s-100s of square miles) The catchment scale typically encompasses whole hydrologic systems. The watershed is the most commonly recognized unit, however all the watersheds around a marine inlet might define a catchment area. peninsulas and islands also describe distinct places, but centering the terrestrial rather than the aquatic. Furthermore large catchments may be subdivided to describe distinct places (for example the Skykomish River within the Snohomish Basin).
  • Landform Scale (1s-10s of square miles) The 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 are useful because they typically encompass an area of similar physiographic processes--those ecosystem processes that form and sustain the character of habitats.
  • Site Scale (10s - 100s of acres) - Sites describe the places we manage for conservation or restoration. They are often defined by ownership or stewardship effort, rather than ecology or physiography, although the two may coincide. Some colleagues use the wiki to document assessments, designs, or stewardship efforts over these sites.
  • Patch Scale (1s - 10s of acres) - Our smallest scale describes specific patches under management. Some people use the wiki to document treatment and monitoring units. These patches are typically measured in acres or tens of acres.

Landforms

Students of ecosystems are keenly interested in how landform describes the character of a place (See Shipman 2008 or Montgomery 1999). In this wiki we use seven distinct landforms to describe places. Each of these landforms has similarities in how its habitats are formed and sustained, how they are developed, how they are degraded, and how they can be restored. This allows similar places to be queried and compared. These categories are generally used as attributes for place pages at the Landform, Site, and Patch scales. The Region and Catchment scales often contain multiple landforms.

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:

Regional Scale

Catchment Scale

Landform Scale

Site Scale


Patch Scale


Categories describing place