Historical Change and Impairment of Puget Sound Shorelines

This report describe a comprehensive, spatially-explicit analysis (Change Analysis) of changes to nearshore ecosystems of Puget Sound—its beaches, estuaries, and deltas—over the past 150+ yr. The earliest land surveys of the General Land Office and U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1850s–1890s) were compared to present conditions (2000–2006). These quantitative changes in the structure of Puget Sound’s shorelines were used with other sources of information to interpret the levels and types of impairment of nearshore ecosystem processes.