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About SPU
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SPU & the Environment
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Salmon Friendly Seattle
Science Findings
Using Science to Improve Salmon Habitat and Our City
Science has helped us learn about the complex life cycle of Chinook salmon. Chinook travel thousands of miles during their life time, from being an egg in a river, to a smolt leaving the freshwater environment for the ocean, and finally to a fully-grown adult fish returning from the ocean to a river ready to spawn. Science has also helped us understand that chinook need certain kinds of habitat at each stage of their life cycle to survive and thrive. Many different threats jeopardize this habitat.
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Scientists examine the contents of a beach net used in research in Lake Washington research in 2001.
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The region has learned much more about what chinook salmon need when they migrate through an urban environment in recent years. In the past much of our knowledge about chinook came from scientific studies conducted far from cities. We understood how these fish typically behave in a mountain stream, but not what they do as they swim near docks in Lake Washington, or along the steep banks of the Ship Canal and the Duwamish.
Today we have a much better understanding of chinook salmon in and around Seattle. In our Urban Blueprint for Habitat Protection and Restoration, we took a hard look at existing studies on chinook in Seattle’s waterways, as well as studies from other urban areas. We also partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to examine how juvenile Chinook salmon use shorelines in Lake Washington, Lake Union, and the Ship Canal (link to study below). We have also worked with other regional and federal partners to host regional Chinook Salmon research conferences. Using this research, we have developed restoration priorities in Lake Washington, Lake Union, the Ship Canal, the Duwamish Waterway, Elliott Bay, and Puget Sound Shorelines.
Sound science is used to guide our decisions about what to do for salmon. Without sound science guiding us, we could fail to restore the most important chinook habitat, or worse yet, make existing problems even larger.
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