Actions

Direct and leverage funding and investments to advance science, monitoring, and adaptive management for Puget Sound recovery. (ID #121)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Develop, fund, and maintain an online searchable database to serve as a comprehensive clearinghouse of scientific information and expertise for use by the Puget Sound protection and recovery community;
• Select and fund investigations that address priority research objectives and work actions in the Science Work Plan for 2020-2024 through Partnership awards for Puget Sound scientific research and monitoring to Accelerate Recovery in 2021-2023 and 2023- 2025 and partners’ (for example, Sea Doc Society, Washington Sea Grant, King County, NOAA Fisheries, Department of Ecology, and Skagit River System Co-op) awards and staffing commitments to carry out investigations that align with priority research and monitoring work actions;
• Build an ongoing research collaboration—including jointly funded investigations and a new Puget Sound fellowship program—between the Partnership and Washington Sea Grant;
• Update the strategic plan for the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program, and develop and begin to implement an unbiased Science Work Plan for 2025-2028 that is designed to inform good policy;
• Develop, fund, and maintain an online searchable database to serve as a comprehensive clearinghouse of scientific information and expertise for use by the Puget Sound recovery community

Coordinate efforts to assess and report on ecosystem conditions and the effectiveness of ecosystem recovery strategies and actions. (ID #122)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Coordinate PSEMP in increasingly open, transparent, and inclusive ways;
• Ensure that local, long-term, and inherently efficient volunteer monitoring programs are well funded, maintained, regionally respected, and designed to offer the added benefit of educating and involving the public;
• Review and adapt the quality, depth, and breadth of research, monitoring, and assessment and the networks through which scientists collaborate and engage with policy makers, science-policy interfaces, and program managers;
• Follow, assess, and report on Puget Sound indicators*
• Develop and apply innovative tools to understand ecosystem conditions as they change over time, and to predict and document those changes; ensure that reporting systems are piloted with partners (for example, LIOs);
• Analyze and synthesize existing information, especially using Puget Sound indicators, to evaluate and report on the ecosystem conditions and the effects of recovery efforts, giving greater attention to inequities in the distribution of environmental burdens and recovery efforts;
• Foster exploration and discovery through coordination of subject matter experts and through comprehensive assessments (such as cumulative effects evaluations) and interdisciplinary investigations;
• Communicate scientific research and monitoring information, on a regular basis, to policy makers, program managers, and the public at large, to achieve greater and sustained support for evidenced-based policy and management decisions critical for achieving goals and objectives;
• Ensure local volunteer monitoring programs are well funded, maintained, regionally respected, and designed to offer the added benefit of educating and involving the public;
• Ensure that reporting systems are Beta tested and will work for a variety of partners who will use them, including LIOs.

Implement priority science work actions from the Science Work Plan for 2020-2024. (ID #182)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Select and fund investigations that address priority research and monitoring actions through Partnership awards for Puget Sound scientific research and Monitoring to Accelerate Recovery in 2021-2023 and 2023-2025 and partners’ awards and staffing commitments to carry out investigations that align with priority science work actions;
• Build an ongoing research collaboration—including jointly funded investigations and a new Puget Sound fellowship program—between the Partnership and Washington Sea Grant.

Collaboratively broaden and improve the knowledge network that supports Puget Sound ecosystem recovery. (ID #183)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Learn from a diversity of partners about what is important in how the knowledge network grows from the current situation and how it functions into the future;
• Learn from others’ experiences about governance and management approaches that have fostered broader engagement and improved network outcomes, especially those that have emphasized incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and addressed environmental justice;
• Identify practical means by which research and monitoring programs and other knowledge providers can access and manage financial and intellectual resources to sustain management-relevant investigations and boundary spanning activities;
• Learn from diverse partners about what makes information “legitimate” and the limitations of traditional western approaches to applied science; conduct evaluation studies to understand and amplify funding impacts;
• Enhance networking across sectors and disciplines and among different types of programs and diverse groups of individuals across Puget Sound and the entire Salish Sea.

Improve linkages among Indigenous knowledge and research and monitoring. (ID #184)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Find creative and meaningful ways to partner with Indigenous science programs;
• Invest in research and monitoring projects and broader strategies that recognize and build on Indigenous knowledge to generate a collective understanding of ecosystems relationships and systems thinking;
• And identify greater opportunities to achieve recovery goals and objectives.

Recognize and embrace human health and wellbeing as a component of ecosystem recovery by identifying and supporting interdisciplinary research that explores and emphasizes the ways in which the health and wellbeing of people and nature are integrated. (ID #185)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Prioritize research and monitoring across Puget Sound that considers the interactions of fundamental social, ecological, and health and wellbeing factors and supports and incentivizes collaborations of biophysical and social scientists.

Build and sustain robust programs and relationships across science-policy interfaces to inform recovery. (ID #186)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Support partners in ecosystem recovery to understand and explore resilience as a strategy, encouraging adoption of adaptive tactics that evolve with new information over time, rather than continue with those more rigid tactics;
• Identify opportunities when ‘policy windows’ are open and when knowledge can be linked to action;
• And engage decision-makers in the production and sharing of policy- and management-relevant information.

Communicate science findings clearly and to the appropriate audiences. (ID #187)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Foster partnerships that support access to the full range of communication approaches and tools that build and sustain the case for Puget Sound recovery (for example, PSEMP Communications Strategy).

Develop and analyze alternative future scenarios to help leaders make decisions that will lead to system-level change under a range of projections for climate change, population growth, and other uncertainties. (ID #188)

Key opportunities for 2022-2026 include:

• Develop and use the alternative future scenario analysis to explore alternative futures and evaluate tradeoffs, among the variety of things valued by Puget Sound residents, across possible approaches to managing growth and governing our behaviors;
• Investigate and better understand the deeper connections, feedback loops, and system structures that drive future conditions to more directly address, plan for, and mitigate those drivers;
• Explore current and planned actions to understand their efficacy into the uncertain future;
• Institute future scenarios approaches as a mindset facilitated through tool kits designed to enable practitioners in the recovery system to consider the many ways the future may unfold and how strategies can be made more robust, responsive, and effective.

Implementation Considerations

What We're Measuring

Current Legislative Actions