- Admiralty Inlet
- Comox Coast
- Discovery Islands
- East Sound
- Fraser Lowlands
- Gulf Islands
- Hood Canal
- Qualicum Coast
- San Juan Islands
- South Puget Sound
- South Vancouver Island
- Squamish
- Strait of Juan de Fuca
- Sunshine Coast
- West Sound
- Whidbey Basin
- Salish Sea References
- 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
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We curate place-based knowledge on this platform by describing places at several scales. We call the Salish Sea a Bioregion. We divide the Salish Sea into Regions such as the 2000 square miles of the South Puget Sound. Regions are often defined as a land area that drains to an oceanic sub-basin. Within regions are Catchments like the 720 square mile Nisqually Watershed, but catchments may also be islands, peninsulas, or drainages around inlets or bays. Our next smaller scale is of Landforms such as river deltas, beach drift-cells or coastal stream basins, such as the 635 acre Schneider Creek Watershed. We go smaller still, and a place may also be a Site such as a large property you are tending, or even a Patch of vegetation in that site. Places are defined by their ecological character. Institutions also claim space using invisible lines to define the reach of their power. On the platform we categorize using a set of Jursidictions and identify the institutions that claim these spaces as 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.
Bioregions On The Platform
While the platform has originated in the Salish Sea, we are rapidly meeting people in adjacent bioregions that want to join the project. We have begun expanding our place categories to include additional bioregions:
Regions of the Salish Sea
Catchments of the Salish Sea
Landforms[edit]
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:
The Riddle of Overlapping Ecological and Political Geography[edit]
Our categorization of places is focused on watersheds and landform-scale processes. However, many Efforts and Products are focused on the policy landscapes. We have a different network of categories focused place as defined by the legal Jurisdiction of Workgroups. Efforts and Products can be categorized by Counties (in the United States) or Districts (In Canada), or by Municipality. In addition we may categories these jurisdicational workgroups by their watersheds of interest, or in turn categorize watersheds as being within the juridication of a particular county. This is how we aim to manage this mismatch between the geography of political power, and how stewardship requires our analysis of ecological patterns.
