When Worlds Collide: Monitoring for Salmon Recovery in the Most Populous Watershed in Washington State

The 692 square mile Lake Washington/Cedar/Sammamish watershed, containing over 1.4 million human inhabitants, has been called the most highly altered watershed on the West Coast.  Yet despite its profound alterations (including urbanization and the lowering and “re-plumbing” of the second largest natural lake in the state), the watershed continues to sustain several salmon stocks including two ESA-listed Chinook salmon populations. Notwithstanding the highly urbanized lowermost portion of the watershed, most spawning and instream rearing occurs outside the Urban Growth Area boundaries, and much of the upper watershed is in protected status or is the focus of large scale restoration, with significant local support. In 2005 a collaborative Salmon Recovery Council representing 27 local governments, citizens, non-profits, state and federal agencies, and business groups ratified the watershed’s chapter of the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Plan (approved by the Federal government in 2007).

Implementation and oversight of the local conservation plan is led by the collaborative Council (with staff funded jointly by the Council) and supported by subcommittees that provide expertise on technical issues, communications, and the selection of habitat protection and restoration projects. Programmatic implementation is assessed by periodic surveys of participating governments and other partners.

Partly because of the large population base, engaged citizenry and local government support, the watershed is able to fund a significant number of habitat restoration and acquisition projects, as well as support monitoring programs to assess habitat, water quality and salmon viability. Recent and ongoing monitoring projects include a multi-year investigation of stream habitat, land use and hydrology trends; land cover change analyses at two spatial scales; and over a decade of Chinook and sockeye spawning and juvenile outmigrant surveys, water quality analyses, and benthic macroinvertebrate sampling.

Contrary to an idealized adaptive management paradigm in which a single institution (e.g., the USDA Forest Service) controls and implements land management actions in an experimental manner, institutional conditions for adaptive management in the Lake Washington/Cedar/Sammamish watershed do not permit a rigorous experimental approach. However, there is strong support for the persistent, accurate collection of data to investigate basic hypotheses of salmon recovery in the watershed. The ‘adaptive’ element of our current approach includes periodic updates to decision makers highlighting areas where corrective action may be warranted.