Northwest Washington GIS User Group Agenda
September 18, 2009

Skagit County Public Utility District No. 1, Aqua Room
1415 Freeway Drive, Mt. Vernon

See Map. (Directions & Abstracts below)

To change or add an email address for meeting announcements, contact stefan 

9:00 – 9:45        Round Table

9:45 – 10:00      Break

10:00 – 11:50      WA Marine Shoreline Public Access Project
Jessica Archer & Jessica Bennett, Wa DOE, DOH

Washington Coastal Atlas: Informing Marine Resource Planning and Management
Kathy Taylor, Wa. DOE

Mapping the Potential Distribution of Shallow-Subtidal Eelgrass in the Southern Salish Sea
Jeremy Davies, NOAA

11:50-12:00       Wrap-up, Announcements

12:15                Optional Lunch at local restaurant (TBA)

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MAP / DIRECTIONS

o  Interstate 5 (North or South) to Exit 227, Mount Vernon; College Way

o  Take College Way west 1 block.

o  Take your first left (south) at the light on Freeway Drive

o  The PUD is about one block south, on the right (1415 Freeway Dr.)

o  Park in the lot behind the PUD building, entrance at rear of building

ABSTRACTS

WA Marine Shoreline Public Access Project, Jessica Archer & Jessica Bennett, Wa. Dept. of Ecology and Wa. Dept. of Health

The Washington Shoreline Public Access Project is a geographic information systems (GIS) project that works to identify the degree of public access, location, and length of Washington State’s marine beaches. Before the project, it was unknown how much of Washington’s approximately 3000 miles of shoreline was publicly accessible and owned by the public. The information was scattered throughout various government agencies and the data quality was variable. Through the Shoreline Public Access Project, the best available information has been summarized into a single data set.  The final product can be used to find areas where public access to the shore is limited and where efforts to increase access should be focused.  The Shoreline Public Access data can also be combined with various data sets to gain a better understanding of the makeup of shoreline that is held in the public trust.  For example, the data can be paired with the Department of Natural Resource’s ShoreZone data to answer spatial questions about the distribution of biological communities, geologic features, and anthropogenic development amongst public shoreline in Washington. The data can also be paired with land use data to better understand ecosystem services and identify areas to focus conservation and restoration efforts.  We will describe the data development process, discuss major findings, and investigate other potential uses of this new GIS data set.

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Washington Coastal Atlas: Informing Marine Resource Planning and Management, Kathy Taylor, Wa. Dept. of Ecology

The Washington Coastal Atlas (http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/sma/atlas_home.html) provides geographically linked information to support informed management of Puget Sound and the outer coast of Washington.  The Atlas is currently used by local and Tribal governments, state and federal planners and resource managers, researchers, consultants, and interested citizens.  It includes information on: habitat features such as wetlands and eelgrass, physical features such as drift cells and slope stability, regulated features such as flood zones, shoreline modifications such as piers and docks, and jurisdictional delineations such as cities and watersheds. The Atlas also includes decades of oblique aerial photos which can be used to view current and historic shoreline features such as level of development and presence of any shoreline modifications.  In addition, the Atlas provides information on land cover changes over time, especially changes in forest cover and impervious surface, between 1991, 1996, and 2001 for all of western Washington at county, watershed and subbasin scales. Planned improvements to the Atlas include adding 2006 land cover data as well as increasing the number of and updating the existing natural resource data layers.  In addition, work on the Atlas is taking several new and exciting directions including: (1) incorporating information showing public access to all of Washington’s marine shorelines ( http://www.csc.noaa.gov/cz/2009/CZ09_Proceedings/Abstract PDFs/Poster.Purce.pdf ) , (2) increasing coordination and collaboration with other coastal atlas type applications on the west coast (http://ican.science.oregonstate.edu/westcoast/) and (3) participating in the International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN) prototype to collaborate and share data for coastal management on a regional and international level (http://ican.science.oregonstate.edu/about_ican).

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Mapping the Potential Distribution of Shallow-Subtidal Eelgrass in the Southern Salish Sea, Jeremy Davies, NOAA Fisheries

Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is known to support a number of ecosystem services. The factors that control eelgrass growth have been identified for some areas of the southern Salish Sea, but to date no effort has been made to identify the intrinsic potential of coastal areas to support eelgrass across the entire area.  In this talk, I will show how we used GIS tools and a species distribution modeling program to classify the nearshore areas of our region in terms of their potential to support shallow-subtidal eelgrass.

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