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Arctic Field Office

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Anaktuvuk River Fire Monitoring
The Anaktuvuk River Fire was the largest, highest-severity wildfire recorded on Alaska’s North Slope since records began in 1956. The 2007 Anaktuvuk River Fire was an order of magnitude larger than the average fire size in the historic record for northern Alaska and indices of severity were substantially higher than for other recorded tundra burns. An interdisciplinary team assessed fire effects including burn severity, potential plant community shifts, and effects on permafrost and active layers. Observers monumented, photographed, and measured 24 burned and 17 unburned reference transects, starting the year after the fire, and spanning the range of vegetation types and burn severities.
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Watersheds draining the Arctic Coastal Plain (ACP) of Alaska are dominated by permafrostand snowmelt runoff that create abundant surface storage in the form of lakes, wetlands, and beaded streams. These surface water elements compose complex drainage networks that affect aquatic ecosystem connectivity and hydrologic behavior. The 4676 km2 Fishand Creek drainage basin is composed of three watersheds that represent a gradient of theACP landscape with varying extents of eolian, lacustrine, and fluvial landforms. In each watershed, we analyzed 2.5-m-resolution aerial photography, a 5-m digital elevationmodel, and river gauging and climate records to better understand ACP watershed structureand processes. We show that...
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Stream physical parameter time series files for six or more beaded streams on the North Slope of Alaska in the Fish Creek Watershed near Nuiqsut. These include time series of water temperature (pool bed and surface and channel runs) and pool stage and correspond stream discharge developed from a rating curve.
This polygon feature class represent areas surveyed for yellow-billed loons (Gavia adamsii) and is one component of the Yellow-billed Loon Geodatabase. This database is intended to be a qualitative “first look” at where yellow-billed loons have been recorded and where surveys have been conducted. This spatial dataset is intended for general planning and mapping purposes rather than for deriving density estimates. The geodatabase is comprised of two feature classes (observations and survey_poly) and two tables (incidental_attributes and reference_information)
The Bureau of Land Management- Arctic Field Office has a requirement for coordinating research andmonitoring projects related to the effectiveness of stipulations and surface resource impacts in theNational Petroleum Reserve - Alaska. Yellow-billed Loons are among the least common breeding birdsin the mainland United States and the U.S. breeding population is concentrated largely within theNational Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPR-A). Interest in developing the oil and gas reserves withinNPR-A has increased within the last 10 years, along with a need for better information with which toprotect loon populations. Fundamental to protection strategies is a good understanding of distributionand abundance.
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