Geodatabase of Puget Sound’s pre-settlement river valley, estuary and nearshore habitats: Acknowledgements
The geodatabase was created by Brian Collins and Amir Sheikh, as part of the Puget Sound River History Project, which is supervised by Dr. David Montgomery, and sponsored by the Quaternary Research Center and Department of Earth & Space Sciences at the University of Washington.
The effort to map pre-settlement environments in the Puget Sound area grew out of a pilot effort sponsored in 1998 by the Skagit River System Cooperative and the Skagit Watershed Council to map historical habitats of the Skagit River delta; in developing our initial mapping methods, we benefited from conversations with Eric Beamer, Research Director of the Skagit Coop. The Bullitt Foundation and the University of Washington’s PRISM (Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model) program provided additional funding and to include the Stillaguamish and Snohomish river deltas. We thank King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks and Dr. Fran Solomon, Senior Ecologist at the County, for support to map historical conditions in the Snoqualmie River valley. The National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Fisheries Science Center provided support to extend mapping to the Nooksack, Skagit, Stillaguamish, and Snohomish river valleys; we thank Dr. Mary Ruckelshaus of the Center’s Conservation Biology Division. Additional funding was provided by the Nooksack Indian Tribe, with a grant from the USDI Bureau of Indian Affairs; we thank Treva Coe, Nooksack Tribe Natural Resources Department. Support to map the Duwamish and Green rivers was provided by King County in a Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Washington. We thank Lorin Reinelt at King County and Dr. Derek Booth in the Department of Civil Engineering. We thank the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Natural Resources Department, and Byron Rot, Habitat Program Manager, for supporting historical landscape change mapping in the Dungeness River area. Support for orthorectifying historical photos and to georeference and digitize Coast Survey topopgraphic sheets for the Puget Sound nearshore area was provided by the Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District; we thank Fred Goetz for his assistance. The Point No Point Treaty Council provided Coast Survey topographic sheets, registered by Alan Carter Mortimer and digitized by Steve Todd and Nick Fitzpatric, for most of the Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, and Strait of Juan de Fuca areas. We thank Phil Block and the Washington Department of Natural Resources Aquatic Resources Division for additional funding to georeference and digitize Coast Survey topographic sheets.
Funding to complete this project, and to make it available online for use with ArcGIS server software was provided by the Bullitt Foundation, PRISM, and the National Science Foundation (SBE/EAR #0648615).
Many individuals and agencies generously loaned and allowed us to create digital copies of archival materials. We borrowed aerial photographs or maps from the Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District; the King County Conservation District; the Whatcom County Conservation District, the Clallam County Conservation District; the King County Department of Public Works; the Whatcom County Department of Public Works; the Washington Department of Natural Resources; the Bureau of Land Management; and the University of Washington libraries. We used lidar provided by the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium and by King County. We thank Byron Rot for providing digital copies of 1914 Clallam County Assessor Maps.
We developed methods for registering and digitizing T-sheets in collaboration with Jennifer Burke, NOAA-Fisheries and University of Washington, and Alan Carter Mortimer of The Point No Point Treaty Council. We thank Tim Wahl for sharing his knowledge of the early history of the Nooksack and Lummi deltas and of early map sources.
A number of GIS technicians painstakinginly registered and digitized Coast Survey topographic sheets and other maps: We thank Leah Briney, Jeremy Bunn, Elizabeth Cassel, Chris Gardner, Suzanne Hawley, Nate Jones, Soleil Kelley, Charles Kiblinger, Joanna Marsolek, Tracy Potter, Isabelle Sarikhan, and David Snyder. We thank Charles Kiblinger for orthorectifying photos and general GIS and website assistance, and Harvey Greenberg for sharing his invaluable GIS expertise.