Clearer Understanding

Assembling Datasets to Create the Full Picture – Puget Sound Integrated Modeling Framework

The Pacific Northwest has terrestrial, estuarine, and marine ecosystem models that can make limited predictions about our future. However, each model is focused on an individual aspect of the larger picture – for example, using data from fisheries, hydrology, biogeochemistry, or food webs. Integration is needed to tell the bigger story and make more informed and useful predictions about our ecosystem as a whole.

The foundation is funding the new Puget Sound Integrated Modeling Framework, led by UW Tacoma’s Puget Sound Institute. The project brings together UW’s Salish Sea Modeling Center, NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, Long Live the Kings, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – and their various models and datasets.

This $2.5 million, three-year grant will result in a linked set of models covering the entire Puget Sound basin and its watersheds. This powerful, linked model will be used as a tool to support regional planning and restoration decision-making, allowing smarter resource management to benefit PNW residents from kelp and fish to orcas and humans.

From Citizen Science to Robotics – Eyes on Kelp with Puget Sound Restoration Fund

Many of us have seen captivating underwater photographs of fish swimming through dense ribbons of brown seaweed known as bull kelp. Kelp forests are dense underwater towers of vegetation close to shorelines where sea otters thrive, foraging for food or napping on the surface canopy. Kelp offers shelter to young fish and invertebrates such as sea stars and crabs and is crucial to the health of Puget Sound. As with many ecosystems, kelp is disappearing in some places while apparently thriving in others – we need to understand why.

Puget Sound Restoration Fund, with the foundation’s three-year, $4.3 million grant, brings together new and expanded efforts to capture data that will inform critical restoration and conservation decisions. The program engages groups of trained volunteer divers, expands kelp monitoring sites, and deploys robotic data sensors. Working with Reef Check Foundation, Marauder Robotics and other organizations throughout Puget Sound, the program will improve our understanding of kelp forests so that we may protect the ecosystems that nourish and underpin our coastal waters.
 

"This program will put eyes, both human and electronic, in the water to monitor kelp so we can determine the best actions to protect these vital underwater forests."

Betsy Peabody, Executive Director, Puget Sound Restoration Fund

New Ways to Monitor and Manage Wildlife – Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) Suite of Grants

KAZA is comprised of the Republics of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zamia, and Zimbabwe, where more than half of the remaining African savanna elephants share space with an estimated 2.5 million people.

To develop clear management plans for long-term elephant and human co-existence, it is important to record and analyze population trends and enable local communities to take action. The foundation’s $2.5 million in funding to the KAZA region is focused on efficiently gathering elephant data and empowering community-based wildlife management. The primary grant has funded an aerial wildlife survey to count elephants and other wildlife in the five KAZA countries. The robust data sets were collected and analyzed in 2022 with results to be made public later this year. They will inform regionally integrated approaches that better harmonize policies, strategies, and practices for managing the shared natural resources that straddle the international borders of KAZA countries.

As part of the aerial survey, we are working to reduce costs and increase accuracy through use of computer vision and artificial intelligence. In addition, we are assisting the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with the development of a new African Elephant Status Report. We also piloted a year-long community development project to engage communities in conversation around the benefits of wildlife and help them explore practices for harmonious co-existence.