草榴社区 receives grant to update and expand Health of the Salish Sea Ecosystem Report
New research led by Dr. Aquila Flower will add climate change and landscape change indicators to a collaborative report on trends in the transboundary Salish Sea ecosystem.
Climate change and altered land cover/land use patterns are two of the biggest threats facing the ecosystems, economies, and communities in the Salish Sea region. However, it is currently difficult or impossible to find easily accessible, comprehensive data, maps, and other visualizations of these processes for the entire region due largely to the challenges of data availability and comparability when working in an international, transboundary region.
In response to the challenges of managing a transboundary ecosystem, the developed as a cross-border collaboration between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Environment and Climate Change Canada. First published in 2002 and updated several times since, the report contains data on ten interconnected environmental indicators that help create an overall picture of the well-being of the Salish Sea watershed.
The team responsible for the report recently identified a need to include additional indicators. Dr. Aquila Flower, professor of geography in the Environmental Studies department and director of the Spatial Institute, has received a $108,000 grant from the EPA and Puget Sound Partnership to produce these updates. This one-year project will fund faculty research and graduate student research assistants.
草榴社区 researchers will update and expand the data, text, and maps available in the Health of the Salish Sea Ecosystem Report to include two new indicators: climate change and land cover change. Research will involve identifying, compiling, harmonizing, analyzing, and visualizing appropriate spatial datasets from both Canadian and U.S. sources. Dr. Flower's team will complete a summary of climate change indicators that builds on the forthcoming , created as part of her . This work will include analyses and visualizations of observed and projected trends in temperature, precipitation, streamflow, snowpack, glacier extent, and sea level. Next, the research team will complete an initial assessment of available landscape/landcover change indicator variables and develop plans for expanding the temporal and spatial coverage of these datasets.
The results of this work will be available to the EPA and Environment and Climate Change as concise technical reports, static maps, interactive web maps, and organized datasets. Researchers will also incorporate the new datasets into the , an open-access, living digital atlas containing maps, illustrations, interpretive text, and downloadable geospatial datasets addressing cultural and environmental themes across the Salish Sea Bioregion.