Puget Sound scientists are building the Matrix.

To be clear, this particular Matrix is not the latest Keanu Reeves star vehicle. You won’t need a red pill or a blue pill. But the Grand Uncertainties Matrix (the “GUM”) as it is called is also a journey into the unknown, one designed to save orcas and restore beaches, to clean up the water and to improve the overall health of the ecosystem.

More specifically, the GUM is a spreadsheet, and within it is a strategic list of scientific uncertainties related to Puget Sound recovery that can be used to prioritize future funding and research.

I spoke with the Puget Sound Institute’s lead ecosystem ecologist Tessa Francis, who originally created the Matrix, to try to find out more about what we know we don’t know.

Tell me about the Grand Uncertainties Matrix. It has a catchy title.

The Grand Uncertainties Matrix is essentially a way for us to keep track of the biggest questions that we have related to Puget Sound recovery, questions that arise while developing recovery strategies.

It is a compilation of things that we are uncertain about. Gaps in our knowledge that come up during the process of working on these strategies.

How did it come about?

It is a response to a series of EPA-funded “Implementation Strategies.” These strategies are designed to take a common sense, science-based approach to specific problems related to ecosystem health.  

We were talking through the process of building these strategies and we recognized that along the way there will be questions that arise, unknowns about how the Puget Sound social-ecological system works. Probably they will range from questions we don’t have the answers for immediately — but the answer is out there somewhere — to large science gaps that require research to resolve. We really wanted to be able to capture all of those, because all of them are barriers to progress in some way. We thought if PSI starts to collect those and rank them, we can start to address them and move the implementation strategies forward.

It’s not just a bunch of random things that we don’t know, right? There’s actually some logic to this.

Yes! The logic is that they come from a consensus process of experts who are thinking about how we might recover Puget Sound. Implementation strategies (sometimes abbreviated as “IS”) are formed around the Puget Sound Vital Signs. And as we move through our ideas about how to achieve recovery for each of them, occasionally we face things we don’t know.

How do you go about the process of identifying these uncertainties?

In the process of designing a recovery strategy for something — let’s say you are trying to improve water quality — there are a set of actions that you’d like to tackle.

Built into that process is a series of assumptions: For example, one strategy might be to take management action ‘a’ that will have response ‘b.’ Maybe that response is a hypothesis. That would be identified as an uncertainty and added to the matrix.

Ultimately, you get a list of uncertainties that is developed within the IS process. At the end, we present that list to the team that’s developing the IS to make sure that everyone agrees that we have identified true unknowns. It’s sort of an expert evaluation of uncertainties and unknowns associated with a particular topic. Hopefully it’s a true unknown because you have a lot of experts in the room.

One thing that PSI does with the list is choose high priority unknowns to address and resolve and check them off the list. Sometimes it’s just chasing down some information; sometimes it’s conducting an in-depth analysis. That information feeds back into the IS process so that our recovery strategies are more solid, based on best available information, and progress towards can be made.