SO1 Christopher Walter, Cascade Land Conservancy, WA

SO1 Christopher Walter, Cascade Land Conservancy, WA

The Problem:

Seattle rests along the shore of Puget Sound on glacier-carved hills below the volcanic Cascade Mountains within what used to be a vast primordial forest dominated by majestic conifer trees that grew to heights well above 200 feet. With rich volcanic soils and a Medeterranean climate that is relatively warm and wet during the winter, dry and cool in the summer, plants of all types thrive in the Puget Lowlands. As the hub of the Northwest’s vibrant economy, thousands of tons of materials from all around the world arrive daily in the Port of Seattle. One of the ramifications of the coincedence of these economic and ecological forces is that Washington's Puget Sound region is plagued with a critical infestation of invasive plants.

After 150 years of logging, view clearing and other landscape-altering processes that come along with urban development, our remnant forests are aging and inundated with invasive plants. Most of our urban trees - primarily quick-growing and short-lived deciduous species that were the first to regenerate after old growth forests were clearcut a century ago - are near the end of their natural lives. Exotic invasives like English ivy climb these remaining trees, rob them of nutrients and sunlight, and act as a “sail” in high winds to topple them over. Others, like Himalayan blackberry, Scot’s broom and Japanese knotweed, crowd out native understory that protects soils and sustains wildlife, and choke off any tree seedlings that would replace today’s forest

Within 20 years, experts estimate that 70% of Seattle’s urban forest will become an ecological dead zone where invasive plants predominate, trees are dead or dying and wildlife habitat is gone.

Our remaining urban forests are the backbone of the city’s green infrastructure, providing an estimated $1.75M annualy in ecosystem services. Seattle residents rely on their forests to mitigate noise, air and water pollution. Healthy forests combat climate change, provide wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities and scenic views essential to our quality of life. Properly restored and cared for, our urban forests are invaluable assets that will continue to serve the community.

The Plan:

The Green Seattle Partnership is a unique, community-based collaboration between Cascade Land Conservancy, the City of Seattle, community groups and city residents to restore and establish long-term maintenance for the city's 2,500 acres of forested parkland by the year 2025. The Partnership envisions a city with diverse, invasive-free, sustainable urban forests supported by an aware and engaged community in which individuals, neighborhoods, nonprofits, businesses, and city government work together to protect and maintain this resource.

The Green Seattle Partnership is one of the largest civic engagement efforts of our time. While the Conservancy and various city departments, most notably Parks and Recreation, provide administrative support, technical expertise, funding, equipment and oversight, the success of Green Seattle relies entirely on community support in the form of advocacy, philanthropy and most importantly, volunteer labor. Coordinated by a core group of dedicated and highly trained volunteer Forest Stewards charged with organizing work parties, thousands of individuals, supported by businesses, community groups and other nonprofits, actively work to remove invasive splants and restore native vegetation to city parks.

The Map:

Our “Urban Forest Restoration Sites” map was created in 2007 to help address the challenges of mobilizing a constituency and galvanizing support for a 20-year project and beyond. It is one of our primary tools supporting publicity, outreach and public education.Partnership staff and volunteers display the poster-sized mapduring frequent presentations to schools, businesses and community groups and at a wide range of public venues such as community fairs, trade shows and other events held throught the city every year. In most cases, the map is part of a larger, visually-oriented display that illustrates the threat of invasive plants, makes the case for restoring our uirban forests, and demonstrates how the Green Seattle Partnership works to manifest our shared vision of healthy, sustainable urban forests throughout Seattle. Most importantly, the map and other display materials tell the story of how volunteers play a critical role in the success of the project, and delivers the message thatthere is both need and opportunity for everyone to contribute.

The map illustrates the magnitude of the conservation challenge by prominently highlighting the locations of Seattle’s forested parklands and portraying them in the context of the familiar urban landscape. Bright red stars indicate which parks that have been active in the program are in need of a Forest Steward to coordinate the local volunteer cadre so that restoration work may resume.

The “hook” relies on the conventional wisdom that the first thing someone looks for on a map is where they live. If they live in Seattle, chances are that there is a forested park within a mile of them in need of care and attention and that, prominently colored in a dark green and boldly labeled by name, viewers will note that proximity. Most residents are familiar with the larger destination parks like Discovery, Interlaken, Lincoln, Magnusen and Seward, but many are often surprised to learn that the small forested hollow or knoll nearby is also a city park. This brings both the challenge and the vision of a Green Seattle to the neighborhoods, and squarely into the daily lives, of every potential volunteer our team encounters..

To fulfill its intended role, the map must also quickly enable the audience to find themselves in Seattle. Familiar navigational references such as neighborhoods, highways, arterial and local streets, public trails, streams, waterbodies and shoreline features – even the parks that are the main subject - are all carefully portrayed, their names clearly labeled.

To impact an audience beyond the subset of cartography afficionados, a map must be both attractive and engaging– it has to grab and hold the audience’s attention before it has a chance to convey its message. We attempted to give the map a prominent and appropriate title, create a balanced layout of map elements distributed with a deliberate amount of blank space, include a limited amount of text to minimize competition with the more compelling imagery, and choose a fairly simple palette of contrasting and complementary colors to ensure our map puts forth an attractive, professional appearance worthy of further inspection.

The basemap content takes advantage of Seattle’s fascinating geography to draw the viewer into exploring their landscape in greater detail. In a region formed by volcanic fire, ice age glaciers and a few thousand years thereafter of the seasonal rans for which the region is (in)famous, Seattle occupies what is essentialy an isthmus between Puget Sound and one of the state’s largest, eponymously named freshwater lakes. Screening back the detail on the land areas outside Seattle emphasizes this effect. A subtle elevation color ramp and shaded relief brings out the complex patterns of hills, valleys, bluffs and sinks in noticable detail. The variety of water featuresconnecting the uplands to the Sound and Lake, which define Seattle’s character as does its forest and nearby mountains, are shown in a contrasting blue, in a detail appropriate to the scale of the map, and with names clearly labeled. To round out the map and give it a finished look, the map labels nearby cities and towns as well as familiar ferry routes to provide a sense of context and connectedness. The entire basemap is intended to offer richdetail for those who are interested without diminishing the primary subjects of forested parklandsand Forest Steward vacancies.

Finally, to reach a wide and diverse audience, a successful map must have a simple message and must communicate it clearly. With the fundamental principles of cartography in mind, we layered and symbolized the dozen spatial datasets involved with careful attention to an appropriate hierarchy of information. For our main subjects of forested park sites and leadership vacancies we chose a bold green and red, respectively, and labeled park names in black with thin white halos to set them off against the park areas themselves. All elements of the basemap appear in various muted shades of either tan for land areas or blues for waters. Labels for corresponding features have similar colors just different enough from the background to be read legibly yet avoid becoming a distraction.

The Impact:

Since its inception in 2004, thousands of volunteers have contributed more than 400,000 hours of labor during 2,500 restoration events. The Partnership has enrolled 625 acres of invasive-infected parkland into the care of our 108 volunteer Stewards. To date, volunteers have planted some 65,000 native tree saplings to rejuvenate lost canopy on newly restored land. Each of these vital statistics have been trending upward annually, building visibility and momentum for the project, and demonstrating that, despite the backbreaking, dirty and often cold and wet nature of the work, Seattelites care deeply about the health and future of their urban forests.

While generaly unrelated to the map, an extensive onging media effort generates new attentionto the program every year. Local busness and community groups continue to sponsor events, contribute materials and supplies, and even organize volunteer cadres from within their own ranks. Local government and elected officials from both sides of the aisle attend our annual, city-wide Green Seattle Day held at the beginning of the fall planting season. On most occasions when Green Seattle personnel gather with groups, however, this map is there in the belief that it will educate and inspire.

Looking beyond Seattle, the Partnership has encouraged four additional Puget Sound cities to initiate their own Green City Partnerships with Cascade Land Conservancy, and we are in discussion currently with several others who are considering joining the Green Cities Network. Our recent partnership with internationally reknown Seattle rock band Pearl Jam to mitigate the carbon emissions from their 2009 world tour by planting trees in each of our five Green Cities generated considerable buzz from the international music scene. Green Seattle staff have had opportunities to present at a number of prominent annual conferences, including the National Smart Growth Conference, Society for Ecological Restoration conference and California Parks and Recreation Association conferences, and the program has received awards from the National Arbor Day Foundation, National League of Cities and Harvard University. Likely catalyzed by this national publicity, Green Seattle has recently been held up as a model for other cities nationwide.

While our cartographer would like to attribute support to the Restoration Sites outreach map some portion of the unqualified success the Green Seattle Partnership has achieved in attracting volunteers, we can offer only anecdotal evidence in the form of complements occasionally delivered in public, and the indirect evidence of our growing volunteer base, to support this claim. Along with other essential marketing tools such as the Green Seattle Partnership website and blog, traditional public media outlets, posters, brochures, advertisements and the power of both peer pressure and viral marketing, however, reason suggests that the map likely plays some role in our success.Although still in progress at this time, the U.S. Forest Service has funded a research project undertaken by Cascade Land Conservancy and the University of Washington to better understand what it is that motivates a volunteer, what can be done to convert a potential one into an active one, and how to keep them involved. Perhaps the results, when they become available, will justify the time and attention devoted to this map.