2000 Puget Sound Update: Seventh Report of the Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program

The first Puget Sound Update was published in 1990. Then, the Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program, or PSAMP, was only two years old and scientists had been collecting information for its initial component studies for about a year. Ten years later, PSAMP scientists continue to collect and evaluate data that make it possible to assess the health of Puget Sound and to prepare the Puget Sound Update and other more detailed technical documents.

Even a quick glance around the Sound provides evidence of changes in our environment since the first Puget Sound Update was written. New developments along the shore have changed Puget Sound beaches. Many types of fish, including wild chinook salmon, Pacific herring and rockfish, are less abundant in the Sound. Bluffs have eroded onto beaches, sometimes endangering people or their homes. Bigger ships visit our ports. Perhaps most noticeable, many more people live in the Puget Sound region. In fact, there’s almost one chance in six that a reader of this report didn’t live in the basin when the first Puget Sound Update was produced in 1990.

This report, like previous versions of the Puget Sound Update, attempts to answer the questions of citizens, lawmakers, resource managers and scientists about the condition of Puget Sound’s waters and its biological resources. The goal of the Puget Sound Update is to provide information that can help readers evaluate current efforts to protect and restore Puget Sound’s water quality and to point out water quality and resource management issues that might require attention now and into the future.