Support the Puget Sound zooplankton sampling program as a Chinook and forage fish management tool.

Action 1

Provide funding to the Washington Department of Natural Resources to monitor zooplankton to better inform and coordinate forage fish and Chinook conservation efforts with state, federal, academic, and tribal partners.

The Governor should continue to fund the Puget Sound Zooplankton Monitoring Program, which leverages the work of eleven partner organizations including tribal, county, state, federal, academic, and other entities to sample and analyze the zooplankton community monthly at sixteen sites throughout the Puget Sound. This program was initiated in 2014 as part of the international Salish Sea Marine Survival Project and was identified as one of the critical monitoring programs that should be continued at the end of the project. This program is essential to better manage Chinook and forage fish populations. The data help determine the role of restoration actions versus marine drivers of productivity in increasing the populations and aid in forecasting forage fish abundance, which helps with management decisions for marine mammals and fisheries.

Funding should continue to be provided through the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to facilitate this program and ensure that the information provided by this program continues uninterrupted.

• The Puget Sound Zooplankton Monitoring Program celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2023 of providing zooplankton data to fill long-standing data gaps for fishery managers and ecosystem modelers. Ongoing funding is provided to support sample collection and analysis by the monitoring program.
• The Puget Sound Partnership has selected zooplankton as one of the newest Vital Signs for the health of Puget Sound, and the monitoring program now provides regular updates of annual and seasonal averages of the amount of zooplankton, and a zooplankton index that are available to researchers, managers, and the public though the Vital Signs website.

More details may be found in the progress reports in the resources library.