marine health
San Juan County is located at the confluence of three major water bodies - Puget Sound, Georgia Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, making its nearshore marine habitats vital to regional marine species. The land area of San Juan County occupies approximately 175 square miles with about 400 miles of shoreline abutting 600 square miles of the Sound and Straits. Although the human population is growing rapidly, San Juan County still offers healthy and intact nearshore habitat for critical marine species, many of which are endangered or at risk.
San Juan County’s forage fish spawning sites, extensive eelgrass meadows and kelp beds offer feeding, refuge and migration corridors for endangered salmon and orcas. Protection of these nearshore habitats has been identified as the most important salmon recovery strategy for the San Juan Archipelago at both the local and regional scale.
The major contribution San Juan County offers the Puget Sound salmon recovery effort is high-quality nearshore habitat critical to salmon and their prey.  Eelgrass meadows, kelp beds and tidal marshes still persist. However, the San Juans have a projected growth rate of 48% for the next twenty years. When you compound this growth rate with the intense development pressures focused along the shorelines, it is apparent that developing long-term regulatory protections for nearshore-marine habitat is imperative.
This unprecedented growth has resulted in significant adverse impacts to our sensitive nearshore ecosystems, threatening some of the most pristine shorelines remaining in the Puget Sound. Because forage fish and juvenile salmon depend on nearshore habitat for their survival, they are vulnerable to the impacts of shoreline development. Primary threats to the nearshore include activities such as home and dock construction, shoreline armoring, vegetation removal, sedimentation, failing septic systems and improperly designed moorings in eelgrass beds. As the majority of shoreline development activity in San Juan County (SJC) occurs through incremental single-family residential development and individual shoreline alterations, the magnitude of impacts may become evident only cumulatively.
FRIENDS monitors permits for the following activities:
Shoreline armoring, the addition of structures or material along the shoreline to decrease the impact of waves and currents or to prevent the erosion of banks or bluffs, is one of the major contributors to loss of shoreline habitat. Boat ramps impact nearshore habitat by physically covering the inter-tidal habitat, and can also impact sediment transport along beaches. A recent study also concludes that shoreline modification can reduce the survival rate
of surf smelt embryos as much as 50 percent.
Read the full report by Casey Rice, from the National Marine Fisheries Service
Docks can have structural and biological impacts to nearshore marine environments, including shading of eelgrass and other light dependent species. Dock construction causes physical disturbances and noise impacts. Structural elements (e.g. pilings), can alter shallow water fish movement and use patterns. Depending on materials used and owner maintenance, docks can also be polluters, acting as sources of creosote and Styrofoam.
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