San Juan Islands

The San Juan Islands sit in the northern Salish Sea (state marine area 7), an archipelago of rocky channels and small bays where cold, ocean-fed water meets the outflow of the Fraser River. The region’s growers are fewer than in the south Sound, but the waters around the islands carry the most complete mix of public monitoring of the three Washington regions: every kind of data source the project uses is measured here.

What’s planned

Phase 2 is in progress. The map below previews the public data sources we plan to bring in for the San Juan Islands region; outlined markers are planned sources, not live readings yet:

• Estuary sensors: the Padilla Bay reserve’s monitoring program has recorded water temperature, saltiness, oxygen, and clarity every 15 minutes since 1996, one of the longest continuous estuary records on the coast.
• Sensors in the water: the Se’lhaem mooring in Bellingham Bay tracks conditions from surface to bottom in near-real time.
• Tides: the NOAA tide gauge at Cherry Point, recording water level every six minutes.
• Offshore buoy: the New Dungeness buoy in the Strait of Juan de Fuca reports wind, waves, and sea temperature, showing what the ocean is sending toward the islands.

The optional lease layer on the map shows state-managed (DNR) aquatic leases only. Most Washington shellfish farming sits on privately owned tidelands, a legacy of the state selling much of its tidelands before 1971, so the mapped leases are a small slice of the region’s working farms.

Coming soon

The San Juan Islands are third in the Washington launch order, after Hood Canal and South Puget Sound. Once these sources are checked and flowing, this page will work like the California bay pages: a live map, plain-language conditions, and clean datasets behind them.