November 16, 2021 — The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe is cleaning up and restoring past environmental degradation in Port Gamble Bay. The Tribe plans to remove an old and decrepit pier and boat launch and install a new one in a more accessible location.

Though mostly elevated, the new boat ramp and floating dock system would affect nearshore habitat. These are the rich shoreline areas where young Puget Sound Chinook salmon and steelhead put on their last growth before entering the open ocean. The impact meant that the Tribe had to work with NOAA Fisheries to assess habitat impacts using the new Puget Sound Nearshore Habitat Conservation Calculator.

NOAA Fisheries developed and introduced the Conservation Calculator last year as a science-based tool to assess the impacts of shoreline development on nearshore habitat. Nearshore developers now have two main choices. They must either:

• Avoid or minimize the impacts of such development
• Compensate for the impacts by restoring comparable habitat elsewhere in the same marine basin in Puget Sound, so that it benefits the same salmon populations.
  

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries