Watersheds of Kitsap: what is a watershed and why does it matter?

Map retrieved from google.com/maps

A watershed is a great many things…

The term watershed refers to the boundaries within which a landscape’s drainage is enclosed. This includes all features of the landscape including streams, lakes, parking lots, and the roof of your home. Some watersheds are enormous and occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles whereas some are just a few hundred square feet. On the Kitsap Peninsula (KP), we enjoy dozens of major watersheds and hundreds of smaller ones. 

The KP’s topography is the product of its impressive glacial past. The whole landscape was, not long ago, under hundreds, and even thousands, of feet of slow moving sheets of ice. These unimaginably large ice sheets scoured the land like a fork scrapping over the top of a stick of butter to form dozens of north to south ridges. A clear example of this unique topography is apparent throughout the KP but is especially visible in the topography of the southern lobes of the KP (see map above). 

Within these ridges of the KP are individual watersheds with widths ranging from a few hundred feet to a few miles. These landscape structure look like the one displayed in the graphic below. 

A watershed has geomorphic features like hills, valleys, plateaus, sand bars, swales, folds in the landscape and ancient lava flows. A watershed often has montane features like glaciers, snowpack, exposed bedrock, and high-altitude peaks, A watershed encompasses many zones of specialized plants and animals like grassy plains, scrubland steppes, temperate forests, and alpine meadows. A watershed hosts human impacts like marine ports, timber resources lands, small villages, large cities, agricultural lands, roads, dams, and houses. And of course, a watershed contains a diverse array of aquatic environments like swamps, rivers, seasonal streams, vernal pools, upland lakes, fens and bogs, estuaries, and intertidal mudflats.   

Graphic retrieved from aces.edu

The KP has countless watersheds created by dozens of parallel rises and drops in the topography. From our cars we mistake these rises as random hills, but they are actually long and often evenly spaced ridges. Drive east to west from Southworth to DeWatto and you will experience thousands of feet of elevation change, but only dozens or hundreds of feet for any given elevation change. The hydrologic result of this geologic curiosity is a dizzying array of creeks, lakes, upland wetlands, and a few small rivers that drain the KP in all directions, but mostly north and south. On a drive to Kingston, we cross Grovers Creek flowing south, and then only seconds later I cross a Carpenter Creek tributary flowing north. The KP’s hydrologic map resembles that of the vascular network of lungs with parallel pathways all feeding the major marine outlfows, which for the KP is Hood Canal, Rich Passage, Port Madison Bay, Carr Inlet, and Case inlet. 

Images retrieved from sciencephoto.com and wdfw.wa.gov

We of the KP lack a common watershed, and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that might be newsworthy on a massive watershed like the Snohomish River, will likely go unnoticed on most of the watersheds that drain the KP. And over the last 150 years, the KP watersheds have been victim to a torture of one thousand cuts, some an unavoidable condition of population growth, others were and are very much avoidable. 

What happens on the upper drainage of a watershed effects the downstream health, and the conditions and biological productivity at the lower reaches and shoreline areas of a watershed can have ecological effects upstream and economical and cultural effects for the region. Our society knows this intrinsically and has watershed idioms baked into our common language. We know what someone is referring to when the speak of the “downstream effects of x, y, and z” or a “cascade of failures.” And we know a “watershed moment in history” is a point at which the further events are irrevocably influenced. 

A watershed is great many things, and the KP is a great many of these great many things. And many of those many great things are in trouble. 

However, the geography of the KP watersheds allows for habitat restoration that is comprehensive if holistically approached with the entire system in mind. Meaningful ecological uplift can be achieved on KP watersheds through coordinated restoration efforts and the identification of keys areas within the watershed to focus those efforts. Examining the whole system to find key areas for habitat rehabilitation that will have downstream effect may only require the coordination of a handful of landowners and far less time, bureaucracy, and resources that would be required to have comparable influence on a much larger watershed. If this process is conducted in multiple watersheds on the KP, there will be meaningful ecological uplift for the Puget Sound and Hood Canal.

Countless non-profit and for-profit entities tackle habitat restoration, but often in a disconnected fashion and with a ‘take what we can get’ agenda. This understandable due to substantial effort restoration can require and the often overwhelming costs of land acquisition or use. The result has been small restoration footprints on land offered freely by landowners or large land acquisitions that are permanently preserved but not always rehabilitated. Economic incentives, the KPs relatively small watersheds, and the increasingly researched and tested watershed approach to restoration offer a future that we may regret not entertaining. 

To guide future restoration efforts The Environmental Law Institute in partnership with The Nature Conservancy published a handbook in 2014 which reported, “A watershed approach is critical to improving the outcomes of wetland and stream protection and restoration projects…Wetland and stream restoration and protection projects in general provide a wide range of benefits. When undertaken using a watershed approach, they can improve the number, type and scale of the benefits.” (ELI, 2014) The handbook goes on to describe the positive outcomes associated with using a watershed approach. They include improvements to water quality, increased flood attenuation, improvements to habitat, a boost to recreation opportunities, and greater economic returns on investments. Most governing bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Ecology, the countless research institutes concerned with environmental studies, and scientists employed by governments and native tribes are in agreement – to improve the ecological health of our region, we must approach the system holistically. 

Increasingly, public lands are being viewed at the watershed level. Kitsap County Parks Department has published a forest stewardship manifesto, revised in 2012, that “emphasizes ecosystem management, a process that considers the environment a complex system functioning as a whole…” (Kitsap County 2012) This should sound familiar as it is an extension of the watershed approach and is appropriately referred to as “the ecosystem approach.” 

The large scale approach of restoration to mitigate permitted unavoidable impacts is also preferable to small scale mitigation. In 2008, the Federal government unambiguously emphasized a preference for environmental impact mitigation to use the watershed approach to restoration. (DOD and EPA 2008) 

Local tribal governmental like the Suquamish, have spent considerable time and resources on the matter as well. The Suquamish Tribe has conducted major watershed assessments on some of larger creek systems in hopes of improving the creeks’ ability to support fish, specifically salmon. The Tribe has made available detailed assessments and recommended actions for Blackjack, Chico, and Curley Creeks. Within those assessments scientist and environmental planners posit many suggested actions to improve or maintain the health of riparian systems.

The assessments state that a water-approach should be employed in restoration and future development in order to maintain existing watershed processes. (ESA 2017).