Effectiveness means producing the results we aim for. At the Puget Sound Partnership, our mission is to accelerate and support the collective effort to recover Puget Sound. Our effectiveness work focuses on measuring how well we’re achieving our goals—healthy ecosystems and thriving communities throughout the region.

By evaluating effectiveness, we can answer important questions like: What actions are working best? What lessons have we learned? How should we focus our future efforts?

Linking data about effectiveness directly to recovery actions helps us:

- Highlight successes

- Make better decision

- Prioritize efforts

- Support policies and laws with solid evidence

Thanks to decades of work with recovery partners across Puget Sound, thousands of habitat restoration and protection efforts have been put in place across different areas and timeframes. We're continuing to work with this recovery community to gather and simplify information about what’s working, so we can improve and adapt going forward.

- Learn about the effects of nearshore habitat restoration on juvenile salmon in the Whidbey Basin

OUR 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. Gathering this information and distilling results into recommendations relies on the network of experts supported by PSEMP. PSP effectiveness studies are motivated by the needs and interest of the PSEMP and larger recovery community. 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 06/27/2025