The culture of the Samish Indian Nation aligns closely with the Salish Sea. Its headquarters are on Fidalgo Island, near Anacortes, and its people are scattered throughout the area, on both sides of the border between the U.S. and Canada. Historically, they lived on five islands in the central Salish Sea: Fidalgo, Guemes, Lopez, San Juan, and Samish.

It may sound like science fiction, but researchers are getting closer to making it possible to geoengineer the climate. A symposium at the University of Washington Thursday and Friday is exploring the ethics of this possible future. One team is developing a way to cool the atmosphere by brightening clouds.

The state agency charged with leading the restoration of Puget Sound says it cannot meet its inaugural goal of recovering the ecosystem by 2020. That’s one of the takeaways from the Puget Sound Partnership’s 2017 “State of the Sound” report, which comes out Wednesday. The reports are issued every two years.

The Salish Sea is a complex web of waterways that includes Puget Sound and the straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia. It also has inflows from 64 rivers and 99 wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. and Canada.

A proposal to spray a neurotoxic pesticide on oyster beds in Southwest Washington is back on the table. Growers in Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor are looking for ways to address an infestation of burrowing shrimp. The state is taking comments on the controversial plan through Wednesday .

Beneath the surface of the Salish Sea, there are hundreds of species of seaweeds growing. They provide habitat and nutrition for many forms of marine life. In Sooke, just west of Victoria in British Columbia, one entrepreneur has developed a line of skin-care products made from foraged kelp.

The Great Barrier Reef, the Galapagos Island, the Great Wall of China: These are all geographic treasures, internationally recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Washington State has one: the Olympic National Park. A nonprofit in Canada is now petitioning its federal government to add the Salish Sea to that list .

New research shows that stormwater runoff, which flows into waterways when it rains, can kill Coho salmon in as much as 40 percent of their local habitat.

For many people in the Northwest, the undamming of the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula marked a dramatic turning point. The largest dam removal in the world at the time, it unleashed the lifeblood of a watershed that fronts on the Salish Sea.

Washington's local ecosystems have been through a lot recently. First, there was the release of more than 100,000 non-native Atlantic Salmon this summer into the Salish Sea. Now, scientists are also reporting alarmingly low numbers of young salmon from the Columbia River system out in the Pacific Ocean.