About the Atlas

The Salish Sea Atlas is an open access digital book containing maps, illustrations, interpretive text, and downloadable geospatial datasets addressing cultural and environmental themes across the Salish Sea Bioregion. This is a living atlas, with new content and updated datasets added as they become available.

The concept of a cohesive Salish Sea region has become a critical focal point for local education, research, restoration, conservation, and policy development. The scarcity of accurate, cohesive, and easily available spatial data and thematic maps covering the entire bioregion is a critical impediment to these efforts. The Salish Sea Atlas aims to address this need.

The Salish Sea is an international estuarine ecosystem encompassing an intricate network of inland marine waterways in Washington and British Columbia. The Salish Sea Bioregion includes both the marine waters and their upland watersheds. This bioregion is home to over nine million people living in and around the Cascadia megalopolis centered on Vancouver and Seattle.

Although divided by an international border, the Salish Sea Bioregion can in many ways be considered a cohesive geographic unit based on its natural and cultural characteristics and history. The Canadian and American sides of the Salish Sea share an interconnected set of waterways, a geomorphic history heavily influenced by past ice ages, an unusually arid rain shadow climate within the context of the rainy Pacific Northwest, vegetation communities reflecting highly variable local climate conditions and a long history of indigenous land use practices, prevalence of agricultural land uses, a very long history of trade and cultural interconnections, and high vulnerability to climate change effects.

All cartography, analysis, writing, and design of the Salish Sea Atlas was completed by Aquila Flower. Dr. Flower is an associate professor of geography and environmental studies and academic coordinator for the Geographic Information Science program at Western Washington University.

Data processing assistance by Risa Askerooth, Trever Mullins, and Roxanne Medina.

Funding for early work on this atlas was provided by Western Washington University’s Spatial Institute, Salish Sea Institute, and Border Policy Research Institute, as well as the ŦELÁNET Centre for Innovation and Peace.