Natural Systems Design

Natural Systems Design (NSD) is a team of scientists, engineers, and planners who are also farmers, fishermen and impassioned river people who have organized our lives to have a positive influence upon our world. Through landscape scale restoration of ecosystems and physical processes, we strive to promote quality of life for local communities and restore balance to natural systems. Through combining ecology, geomorphology, hydrology, hydraulics, and engineering services, we design rivers, streams and wetlands that look and perform as functional ecosystems. NSD scientists and engineers work to restore aquatic and ecosystem processes to self-sustaining conditions. Whether through design of innovative flow regimes to restore hyporheic zones, enhancement of habitat complexity using large wood and log jam structures (ELJs), or design of riparian zones and instream spawning and rearing habitat, the firm works along urban streams, large rivers and their tributaries, in estuaries, and along shorelines to restore watershed processes. NSD has an interdisciplinary team of 35 professional employees. Senior designers each have 10 - 20 years of construction supervision experience and bring this knowledge to bear in creating build-able and cost-effective designs. We have offices located in Seattle WA, Bellingham WA, and Port Angeles, WA.