Moving toward solutions: Measuring positive change in urban seas

Environmental science is good at problem identification. But once we have identified a problem how we do move toward making positive change and detecting that change in noisy systems? Solutions thinking is necessary to alter the environmental trajectory in urban sea systems, like the Salish Sea, where urbanization and climate change create compounding impacts. Calls for improving ecosystem function to improve resilience and benefit species like Pacific salmon have resulted in ecosystem restoration projects that are expanding in size and scope. The need for ecosystem assessment in estuaries and urban seas with myriad stressors means novel approaches are needed to identify problems, generate solutions, and evaluate change. Cumulative Effects Evaluation is one approach for bringing disparate data sets together in a new way. Using an example for salmon habitat restoration in Whidbey Basin, I’ll explain the framework, the causal analysis at the base of it, and provide additional examples of how urban sea systems can benefit from data synthesis, from models to community engagement.