A newly released comprehensive Puget Sound Kelp Conservation and Recovery Plan was released in May 2020, with participation from leading experts, organizations, agencies, and tribes. Kelp are a foundation species critical to the health of marine biodiversity, including important commercial fisheries. Devastating losses have occurred on the West Coast since the advent of the Warm Blob, and continuing marine heat waves are taking their toll. Puget Sound is feeling the loss as well, and this newly released plan provides background information and a roadmap to kelp conservation and recovery.
Background information: Extensive bull kelp losses in South and Central Puget Sound, along with localized declines throughout the region, are cause for concern for the health and stability of bull kelp and understory kelp forests in Puget Sound. Kelp forests provide a variety of direct and indirect services for nearshore marine habitats and human coastal populations. Kelp forests of Puget Sound are ecosystem foundations, like coral reefs and tropical rainforests, which supports diverse and productive communities. Like eelgrass, kelp ecosystems provide critical habitat that increases overall biodiversity and are important for many economically valuable threatened salmon species and endangered rockfish.
Initiated in 2016 as part of the Puget Sound rockfish recovery effort, scientists and resource managers used a collaborative approach to review local science and policy relating to kelp forests. Coordinated action is needed to reverse downward trends in kelp populations by addressing both longstanding and emerging stressors. The Puget Sound Kelp Conservation and Recovery Plan provides a research and management framework for coordinated action to better understand kelp population dynamics and drivers of declines while also working to strengthen implementation and enforcement of protective measures. Successfully achieving kelp conservation and recovery will require a collaborative effort between our community of Tribes, managing entities, and stakeholders in Puget Sound.
Read the full Kelp Conservation and Recovery Plan and its Appendices
]]>A device attached to the hull of a Port Townsend-Coupeville ferry will help scientists collect data on low-oxygen water and ocean acidification
PORT TOWNSEND — The state ferries system has attached a device to the hull of the MV Salish on the Port Townsend-Coupeville route to provide data on low-oxygen water and ocean acidification from Admiralty Inlet.
“This will help us understand Puget Sound much better,” said Sandy Howard, a Department of Ecology spokesperson.
“It provides a new piece of information that we never had before and will allow us to monitor current, velocity, temperature and the flow of fresh and salt water on a long-term basis.”
During a recent servicing, Washington State Ferries crews attached the sensor, an acoustic Doppler current profiler, to the bottom of the Salish, which makes 11 daily crossings between Port Townsend and Coupeville on Whidbey Island.
The sensor gathers data during the crossings of the area known as Admiralty Inlet, or Admiralty Reach, the gateway to the Puget Sound, where salt and fresh water merges.
The project is a partnership among Ecology, Washington State Ferries and the University of Washington.
It is supported by a $261,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The rudder-shaped device, which extends about 40 inches from the middle of the hull, both stores and transmits data, according to Cotty Fay, chief naval architect and manager of vessel design for the ferry system.
The device is expected to last at least five years and will cause the ferry to have a “very small” slowdown of about 0.5 percent, Fay said.
“Every tide is different than the one before,” Fay said. “Over a long period of time, we will get a profile of how the water moves in and out of Puget Sound.”
Read more here
]]>Ocean acidification has scientists and policymakers in the Northwest concerned. Washington Governor Chris Gregoire has convened a panel on Ocean Acidification, which met this week. Ashley Ahearn reports.
Remember those little pieces of paper you used to measure pH back in junior high school? You’d stick them into your can of coke or on your tongue and the color would tell you how acidic that liquid was?
Well if you stuck litmus paper into the world’s oceans it would come out closer and closer to the acidic side of the pH scale.
Feeley: “The acidity of the ocean has increased by 30 % over the last 250 years.”
]]>