Rare Plants and High Quality Ecosystems Mapped in Washington State

 The new HDMS mapper from WNHP shows rare plants as well as Ecological Integrity Assessments (EIAs) for a wide range of ecosystems.

For example, here are the rare plant areas East of Renton:

And here are the natural ecosystems with an "A" rating:

Where is most biodiverse?

 iNaturalist can be used to compare biodiversity in different locations.  

To do this, it is important to allow for different search effort in different areas: for example, a search of the middle of the Amazon might not return many species, not because there aren't many, but because people haven't observed them.

For the U.S., we will assume that search effort is at least somewhat comparable.  We will also look at total observations and divide them by total species to get some idea of the effort required to document a new species in that area.

We decided to investigate my home town in Washington State, Alexandra's home town in Ohio, one of our favorite places: Maui, and our current home in Arizona.

Port Orchard, WA

A 100 km search radius includes most of Puget Sound, the Olympic mountains, and Seattle.

Dublin, OH

A 100 km search radius includes most of central Ohio creeks, woodlands, agricultural lands, and all of Columbus OH.

Prescott, AZ

A 100 km search radius includes canyons and mountains between Flagstaff and Phoenix.

Maui, HI

A 100 km search radius includes all of Maui as well as ocean channels and nearby islands.

Summary Table

According to this analysis, Washington is most biodiverse, followed by Ohio, then Arizona, and in last place is the island paradise of Maui.  

Island biogeography teaches that islands, although unique for their level of endemic plants and animals, should be deficient in overall biodiversity if there hasn't been enough time for biodiverse taxa to colonize or evolve on the island.  This seems to be the case with Maui, which is especially depauperate in insects, given its tropical location.

Arizona, despite its diverse environments, is significantly lacking in Fungal diversity, which could be due to the arid climate.

The American Midwest, with its perfect seasonal growing climate, is remarkably biodiverse, and would probably surpass Washington if this search had included a more varied part of the Midwest with more mountains and/or rivers and lakes.

Washington tops the list as most biodiverse, probably because of the presence of diverse environments, with everything from alpine mountain tops to ocean kelp forests, and everything in between.  This is despite the lower number of insect species compared to a lower latitude place like Ohio.

A caveat to this entire analysis is revealed by the Total Observations in each area and the resulting Observations per Species.  While I had assumed that search effort would be equivalent across the US, it is evident that many more people are using iNaturalist around major cities like Seattle and Columbus.  Arizona is more sparsely populated and has many less observations, and Maui, despite the huge numbers of tourists, is even less populated.  This means that is only takes 20 or 27 new observations (on average) to observe a new species in Maui and Arizona, respectively, while it takes 47 or 72 new observations in Ohio and Washington, respectively, to observe a new species.  So even though Washington has the most observed biodiversity in iNaturalist, it may be easier to find new, previously-unobserved biodiversity in Maui or Arizona.

Salmon Habitat Mapping: Southworth, WA

Smoke from WA Wildfires Reaches Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The smoke from large wildfires burning in NE Washington, N Idaho, and N. Montana reached as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico on Sunday morning.

The smoke covers a large part of the Western U.S.

Cliff Mass has excellent reporting on the smoke from the WA wildfires.

Airquality.weather.gov has the best air pollution monitoring data.  The AIRPACT website has high-resolution models of smoke production and transport in the PNW.

U.S. Wildfire Activity Map.  From ESRI.

Seed Zones for Western Wheatgrass

The USDA Pacific Northwest Field Station has published research examining the population geographic structure of Western Wheatgrass.  They measured three major phenotypic factors from grass seed collected throughout the interior northwest: height, flowering date, and leaf width.

Solar Insolation in the West

Wilderness in the Inland Pacific Northwest

Climbing Mt. Elinor, WA

From Climbing Mount Elinor, WA

From Climbing Mount Elinor, WA

From Climbing Mount Elinor, WA

From Climbing Mount Elinor, WA

Welcome to the Jungle (Western Washington Temperate)

the maritime pacific northwest, the land of giant-sized plants, everything flowering, 16 hours of sunlight, 2 hour sunsets, and all the beer and meat I can eat. Our explorations today included an investigation of the lowest tide (-3 feet) this month, and a trans-estuary hike to a small creek where the old brick factory used to be. Beautiful wetland!

Through the blackberries. A machete is helpful.

Wild plum. Invasive English Ivy sheathes most of the Big Leaf Maples, and 6-ft Urtica is common understory. Nutka Rose and Sitka Brome announce that this is Cascadia.

The jungle beckons. Roses and Blackberries and Fireweed occupy the drying gradient rim. The history, hydrology, and area are heavily impacted by humans.

This is a protected sanctuary, rimmed by 200 ft douglas fir and dominated by a grass-leaved Luzula (?), Salicornia, Distichlis spicata, and a fleshy leaved Asteraceae.

In the center of the stream's meander through the intertidal zone.

Entering the estuary, we decided to take a shortcut across the muck-filled intertidal zone.

Eggshell casting: these cast-off sand collars are rubbery and fun to tear. The snails leave them behind when they dive under the sand to evade the sun.

We saw red, white, and transparent worms, some with tubular casings, snails, geoducks, and many, many dead crabs. (not sure why).

Poking the seasnail.

Ecoregions

Ecoregions, or Ecological Systems, or Ecosystems, or Biomes, are defined differently for different purposes. Many scientists have attempted to develop objective classifications for ecosystems modeled after Linnaeus' classification for species; however, there remains no standardized way for talking about the bio/geo landforms of the Earth.

"Biomes" usually refer to the largest physiogonmic classes of vegetation on the earth, such as Tundra, Conifer Forest, Deciduous Forest, Tropical Forest, Grassland, and Desert. They are determined by climate. Classifying nature can be useful to determine the relative effect of man's activities in different places. For example, here is a map of America's Army Bases and biomes, color-coded to show where military training exercises can be most damaging to the environment. Restorationists use ecological classifications to determine what a particular landscape used to look like, and hence what seeds to buy. Native Seed Network uses EPA's level III map of ecoregions, but they are aware that this is just one subjective mapping effort among many.

For example, a glance at the following biome maps of North America shows some of the differences.




Maps of the U.S.:



Zooming in even more can help explore the differences. Maps of Western Washington:



Landsat:
Climate:

Why are there two tides every day?

Screenshot from http://www.dairiki.org/tides/daily.php/sea/2009-01-04

Searching for Old Growth in Kitsap

Kitsap Peninsula and associated islands occupy rainforest habitat surrounded by the Puget Sound in Washington State. While old growth forests remain intact in the mountainous National Parks (Olympic, Rainier), finding representative primary forest in the lowlands can be more difficult. This landscape has been heavily impacted by human economies for hundreds of years, and with no major geographic barriers, almost everything was clear cut. Second-growth forests are growing back beautifully in some parks, but locating Minimally Disturbed Condition is essential in forming a picture of the Historic Range of Variation that these second growth forests could be expected to grow into.

Here is a short list of places that might still harbor original old growth rain forests. I would welcome any more suggestions.

Kitsap Forest NAP (Washington State Natural Area Program and Stavis Creek Preserve)
This 572-acre forested site on the Kitsap Peninsula became a natural area preserve in 1998. Mature and old growth douglas fir and western hemlock dominate this forest with rhododendron, evergreen huckleberry, and sword fern in the forest understory. This is one of the few extensive unlogged mature forests remaining in the central or southern Puget Trough ecoregion. The site also protects portions of Stavis Creek, which supports coho and chum salmon spawning grounds, a blue heron rookery, and nesting osprey.

Mountaineers Kitsap Property
set within a 280-acre rhododendron preserve, site of the annual Forest Theatre.
3000 Seabeck Hwy NW. Bremerton, WA 98310
After .5 mile, turn right on Northlake Way (first major road on right). Continue .3 mile, turn right at the Triangle Automotive shop. Bear right at the stop sign onto Seabeck Highway. After crossing the railroad tracks, go .7 mile and you will see our sign

Guillemot Cove Nature Reserve
19235 Stavis Bay Road NW, Seabeck
The cove is home to old growth trees, a salmon-bearing stream and a breathtaking view of the Olympic Mountains. The walk is approximately three miles roundtrip.
from Hwy.3, take Newberry Hill exit; travel to Seabeck Holly Road; turn right. Drive to Miami Beach Road; turn right - drive to "Y"; veer left onto Stavis Bay Road. Drive 4.5 miles to the entrance and parking lot.

?? NAD Park urban park frisbee golf
The course at NAD Park winds through more than "20 acres of old growth forest",....
6002 Kitsap Way, Bremerton


?? Illahee Preserve
Supposed to contain old growth, but we found only a few solitary old (but not old growth) trees amidst second growth forest. This image of suburban sprawl gives a good idea of what has happened to most forests at this elevation.

reference: VisitKitsap

Unincorporated Kitsap County

"Your discussion of ecological assessment caught my interest, too. Environmental
historians--those practicing in history departments, not science
departments--often pay special attention to the language folks use to describe
nature: "enhanced" or "degraded" for whom? This impulse mostly derives from
historians' understanding of the entwined relationship of colonialism and
science, of which there is a large scholarship. As you might imagine, Native
people could lose out when colonial scientists helped categorize, map, and
explain landscapes in the American West for settlers. Terms like "healthy
landscape" meant healthy for settlers, not Natives. Historians always stress
the human dimension--otherwise we'd never get tenure!"

"But I do see that even twentieth-century language--"enhanced," "degraded"--is
falling by the wayside. What sort of language is cutting edge these days? Any
good references?"

Since restoration is often interdisciplinary, the language we use is sometimes more intuition than institution.

"We define river restoration as assisting the recovery of ecological integrity in a degraded watershed system by reestablishing hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological processes, and replacing lost, damaged, or compromised biological elements."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005WR003985.shtml

What all of this is pointing at is a very intuitive concept: health. There are also various ways and tools for evaluating health. But the general concept of ecosystem health is not really in question any more than is health for the individual human. While there are different systems of medicine (Ayurvedic, Naturopathy, Homeopathy, Osteopathy) they all share core values. Healthy bodies, like healthy ecosystems, are easy to recognize, yet hard to define.

A general definition of health might be linked to integrity, or functionality, productivity (of green biomass, AKA carbon sequestration) or sustainability (of soil and water resources). For example, we look at how an ecosystem provides services: how it adds to life and measurable values that rely on life: water, air, recreation, hunting, resource-production.

The whole gamut of ecosystem services, from pollination to producing oxygen, clean water, and climate control. The recent efforts to attach price tags to these services has the important goal of revaluing natural systems in our capitalist economy. In the past the price of a tree was the sale of a tree, but now we can enumerate the costs in that transaction, the detriment to the salmon run, to clean air and erosion control, to endangered species and multiple-use, sustainability, functionality, productivity, sequestration, elasticity (ability to buffer e.g. climate change)

The notion of ecosystem health in the professional sphere is supported by factor analysis. Perhaps, as in other sciences like Quantum Mechanics, there are only equations: a relationship between numbers and variables. You could as well call the primary factor "oogly-boogly" as "impairment" or "health". But I don't think that is quite right, either. The math is logically constructed to conform to and confirm the consensus in the scientific and resource management community.


That consensus is one of the biggest untold intellectual ideas of the last hundred years: that ecosystems, like people, can be intrinsically healthy or unhealthy. The history of the American conservation movement, from the transcendentalists "preserving" sublime landscapes to environmentalists' campaigns to save the whale, eco 'hot spots' of "diversity" (watch out for that Chimera), and now landscape-level Resource Management, charts the emergence of a unified scientific consensus about what constitutes and is necessary for a healthy ecosystem. Thanks to Science, Technology, and Society scholars such as Kuhn, I needn't argue that we've progressed to a final understanding; there are certainly many technical difficulties in applied ecology/restoration, e.g. measuring "productivity". But I do want to argue that there is a progression; scientists understand ecosystem health in more and better ways than we used to, e.g. new wolf recovery plans take into account advances in theoretical genetics...

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Maybe a better investigation of these concepts than I can provide would do something to alleviate the profound misunderstandings perpetrated and perpetuated by human ignorance on the Earth. It is as if basic laws of physics, such as gravity, were widely unknown and people routinely attempt to violate them. I say attempt, because, when people "cheat" nature, they always end up loosing. (e.g. : tamarix removal without native replanting fails, plowing windbreaks and conservation reserve grasslands creates dustbowl conditions, fire severity increases even as we spend more and more to control it, etc)
As someone astutely pointed out, sustainability isn't just a value, its a law of of physics (conservation of energy). It seems to be a law of healthy ecosystems, too. I'll let you know more as I figure it out. That factor analysis is especially vexing. I can't tell what their null hypothesis was...this discussion pokes at the undefined underbelly of restoration, which is in its infancy as a professional field. Perhaps that wild west character is why I'm attracted to it. I can work with restoration professionals in the field who are every bit as scientific as scientists in the University's' laboratories, without all the latter's emphasis on paradigm jargon and professional status. I'm sorry I can't think of any sources that focus on defining the concept superstructure of health in ecology and restoration.