November is the annual #30daymapchallenge, in which participants challenge to create a new map every day in response to a shared set of daily prompts. I am using this as inspiration to make new maps using data from the Salish Sea Atlas. Here are a few from the first week.

 

 

The “Climate of the Salish Sea Bioregion” chapter of the Salish Sea Atlas was selected as one of the best map series at the 2023 ESRI User Conference!

The Salish Sea Bioregion’s diverse topography and hydrology create patterns of local climate that vary impressively across relatively small distances. For example, annual precipitation at high elevations in the Cascade Range or Coast Mountains can be more than 10 times that at low-elevation sites in the rain shadow created by the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.

Open the Climate chapter to explore the spatial patterns of temperature, precipitation, and wind variables across the Salish Sea Bioregion.

The maps in this chapter use a combination of climate station records and gridded, interpolated climate surfaces with averages calculated for the 1991-2020 period.

Recent discussions around the proposed Roberts Bank Terminal at the mouth of the Fraser River and its potential transboundary effects outside of Canada are a reminder of the significance of the Fraser River for the entire Salish Sea.

This map shows the major rivers of the Salish Sea’s watersheds along with heavily generalized marine surface currents. The Salish Sea is considered an estuarine ecosystem due to the large amount of freshwater that enters the sea each year, and well over half of that freshwater comes from the Fraser River. This freshwater mixes with the marine waters that enter the Salish Sea from the Pacific Ocean to form a brackish surface layer. The brackish surface water currents spread out both north and south from the mouth of the Fraser River, eventually reaching much of the Salish Sea.

Ocean currents do not recognize international borders. Changes to the Fraser River therefore have the potential to alter ecological and oceanographic conditions across the Salish Sea.

You can learn more about the rivers and watersheds of the Salish Sea in the Freshwater chapter of the Salish Sea Atlas.  

Map details: the rivers are symbolized by their average annual discharge of freshwater during the 1981-2010 time period, with data from USGS and Environment Canada (full data details and download available here). The Brackish Surface Flow currents are heavily simplified and generalized representations of the annual tidally averaged surface flow based primarily on Khangaonkar et al.’s (2016) analysis of results from the Salish Sea Model. Larger surface current arrows indicate larger volume currents. Download the full-size map here.

Happy Cascadia Day! The Salish Sea Bioregion is nested within the larger Cascadia Bioregion. Cascadia Day is a good day to think about better ways to imagine the regions we humans name, manage, care for, protect, relate to, and love. It’s not hard think up better systems than the arbitrary political boundaries we typically use. Bioregions, with boundaries based on physical landscape features or ecological systems, are often delineated using watersheds. This map shows the Cascadia Bioregion’s location relative to major North American watersheds. 

The Salish Sea Atlas project debuted in poster form at the 2023 annual conference of the American Association of Geographers conference in Denver, CO.

View the full-size poster of “CREATING AN ATLAS OF THE SALISH SEA BIOREGION” as a PDF or PNG file.

Dr. Flower presented “CREATING AN ATLAS OF THE SALISH SEA BIOREGION” at the Western Washington University College of the Environment Speaker Series on March 9th 2023. Details and a recording of the presentation are available here: https://cenv.wwu.edu/speaker-series/creating-atlas-salish-sea-bioregion

 

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Here is an excerpt from one of the draft chapters in the Salish Sea Atlas showing the approximate distribution of Coast Salish languages.