Decades of hard work and planning with recovery partners around the Puget Sound has led to the coordinated implementation of hundreds, if not thousands, of habitat recovery and protection actions over various geographic scales and time frames. We are working with the recovery community around the region to access and distill information about what’s been effective in restoring Puget Sound and how to improve our work as we look to the future.

Evaluations of effectiveness can help answer questions such as: What actions are most effective? What did we learn from our past efforts? How do we prioritize our work?

By directly connecting effectiveness data to recovery actions, we can highlight our successes, improve how we make decisions, prioritize actions, and provide justification for policy and legislative decisions.

PUGET SOUND PARTNERSHIP ROLE IN EFFECTIVENESS ASSESSEMENTS

The Puget Sound Partnership continues to build a base of scientific knowledge on ecosystem recovery and the effectiveness of recovery strategies and actions to provide relevant policy information for decision-makers. This function helps to ensure the accountability of our actions, communicates the effectiveness of actions, report progress toward regional targets associated with the Puget Sound Vital Signs and ecosystem recovery goals, and promotes the consistent and adequate evaluation of recovery progress.

A variety of efforts are underway to evaluate the effectiveness and progress of recovery actions to incorporate learning in decision-making at both regional and local scales.

These efforts aim to:

1. understand whether project-scale activities were implemented in alignment with the expectations of project plans and designs (implementation monitoring);
2. evaluate whether the immediate goals and objectives of recovery actions are contributing toward ecosystem recovery goals and targets; and
3. assess the impact of regional plans and programs on regional recovery goals and targets, or to test the assumptions, standards, and guidelines used in the development of regional plans or programs.

See effective action fact sheets and summaries for more information

The PSEMP network is integral to effectiveness evaluations in Puget Sound

The Puget Sound Partnership engages the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP) and the larger recovery community to understand and share what’s working to restore and protect Puget Sound. Scientific studies to evaluate the effectiveness of recovery efforts are numerous and ongoing. Gathering this information and distilling results into recommendations relies on the network of experts supported by PSEMP. As a network, PSEMP is well-suited to quickly find relevant studies on topics of current interest. In addition, the broad participation in PSEMP provides a forum to vet the conclusions derived from multiple, individual studies before they are shared as recommendations.

Last updated 09/19/22