PUGET SOUND VITAL SIGNS

Do you wonder how Puget Sound is doing? Do you want to know how many orcas and are salmon living in our shared waters and what is happening to their habitat? And how many natural resource jobs does Puget Sound support? The Puget Sound Vital Signs offer answers to all of those questions and many more.

Visit the Vital Sign website  

The Puget Sound Vital Signs are measures of ecosystem health. More specifically, they help express each of the Puget Sound recovery goals for healthy human populations, quality of life, species and food webs, habitat, water quality and water quantity. The Vital Signs themselves represent the components of the ecosystem important to the recovery community like streams, birds and cultural wellbeing. Each component, in turn, is measured with one or more indicators. While the indicators measure ecosystem conditions and whether conditions are improving, targets help to articulate the desired future condition, particularly in 30 to 50 years from now.

Together with partners, we REPORT on OVER 50 indicators

Vital Signs and indicators are core to the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP). Thanks to both long-standing and new monitoring programs from throughout PSEMP, we are able to report data contributed by dozens of people from state and federal agencies, local jurisdictions, tribes, not-for-profit environmental organizations, academia, and consultants. The Partnership collaborates with expert teams who contribute their monitoring results and topical work groups in PSEMP who review the indicators and synthesize information to produce high-level messaging for each Vital Sign. As a means of supporting indicator reporting, the Partnership funds several projects through a biennial solicitation process. Information about the Monitoring to Accelerate Recovery solicitation is available at this link.

THE VITAL SIGNS are FOR communication and more

The Vital Signs and their indicators are primarily a communication tool to help draw attention to the condition of Puget Sound. They are part of a larger suite of indicators, coordinated by the Partnership, that tell the story of Puget Sound recovery progress and serve as a shared monitoring and evaluation system for the recovery effort. The Puget Sound Indicators include Vital Sign Indicators and Action Agenda Progress Indicators. Together they describe the collective progress desired for Puget Sound recovery (Vital Sign Indicators) and the actions that we need to do to make progress (Action Agenda Progress Indicators).

RESOURCES

• Fact sheet and full report that describes how the 2020 Vital Signs revisions
• List of Vital Signs and indicators in a spreadsheet form
• Targets
• Vital Signs visuals
• Projects funded by the Partnership to support indicators and other aspects of monitoring
• Equity Guidebook: A framework and tools to help the monitoring community apply an equity lens to the Puget Sound Vital Signs