Eelgrass beds in Puget Sound provide valuable habitat for crabs, young salmon, herring and a plethora of other species.
(NOAA)
Eelgrass beds in Puget Sound provide valuable habitat for crabs, young salmon, herring and a plethora of other species.

Eelgrass, a marine plant crucial to the success of migrating juvenile salmon and spawning Pacific herring, is stable and flourishing in Puget Sound — despite a doubling of the region’s human population and significant shoreline development over the past several decades.

That finding surprised scientists who study eelgrass, which sprouts in the brackish waters close to shore and provides shelter and breeding habitat for fish and invertebrates. Along many beaches in Puget Sound, eelgrass has disappeared or drastically declined due to factors such as warmer, cloudy water, shoreline armoring and structures like piers and docks that block sunlight.

The new findings, published online in November in the Journal of Ecology, draw on a unique 41-year dataset to show that the eelgrass population is doing well across the Puget Sound basin. That means eelgrass die-offs at individual beaches are not pervasive enough to affect the overall population across the region.

“Our human population has exploded; we have all kinds of increasing impacts on Puget Sound, and yet eelgrass is resilient,” said co-author Phil Levin, a University of Washington professor of practice and lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy. “It gives us hope about the ability to restore eelgrass. It tells us that what we do at the neighborhood scale matters, and we can have a positive impact.”

The study’s authors were able to analyze trends in eelgrass population over 41 years — the longest period ever recorded for this species in Puget Sound — by making use of shelved data that recorded more than 160,000 eelgrass observations dating back to the early 1970s.

The Seattle Times also wrote about this research on January 3, 2017. Read “A bright spot in Puget Sound: Sealife-nurturing eelgrass beds are holding steady“.

Read more at UW Today »