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Western Alaska Landscape Conservation Cooperative

Nearshore bathymetry is a vital link that joins offshore water depths to coastal topography. Seamless water depth information is a critical input parameter for reliable storm surge models, enables the calculation of sediment budgets and is necessary baseline data for a range of coastal management decisions. Funding from the Western Alaska LCC resulted in the purchase of field equipment capable of shallow water measurements in rural settings, allowing collection of nearshore bathymetry around western Alaska communities. The resulting vector data shape files of nearshore bathymetry for Gambell, Savoonga, Golovin, Wales, Shismaref, and Hooper Bay are available by following the link below.
This project established a permafrost monitoring network in this region, providing a baseline of permafrost thermal regimes for assessing future change at a total of 26 automated monitoring stations. Stations have collected year-round temperature data from the active layer and the permafrost starting from the summer of 2011. The strong correspondence between spatial variability in permafrost thermal regime and an existing ecotype map allowed for the development of a map of ‘permafrost thermal classes’ for the broader study region. Further, the annual temperature data was used to calibrate models of soil thermal regimes as a function of climate, providing estimates of both historic and future permafrost thermal regimes...
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The primary purpose of this project is to acquire long-term data series ontemperature of selected lakes to support management of nursery habitat of lakerearingjuvenile sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) in relation to climatechange. We adopted protocol developed by the National Park Service (NPS) toestablish moored all-season vertical temperature monitoring arrays in eight lakesof Kodiak, Togiak, and Alaska Peninsula/Becharof National Wildlife Refuges(NWR) in summer and fall 2011. We recorded lake temperature at a resolution of0.02°C on an hourly basis at various depth strata between lake surfaces and lakebottoms. Monitoring sites were visited annually or biannially to extract data andto service monitoring equipment....
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This project evaluated the potential impacts of storm surges and relative sea level rise on nesting geese and eider species that commonly breed on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (Y-K Delta). Habitat suitability maps for breeding waterbirds were developed to identify current waterbird breeding habitat and distributions. Short-term climate change impacts were assessed by comparing nest densities in relation to magnitude of storms that occurred in the prior fall from 2000-2013. Additionally, nest densities were modeled using random forests in relation to the time-integrated flood index (e.g., a storm specific measure accounting for both water depth and duration of flooding) for four modeled storms (2005, 2006, 2009, and...
Categories: Data; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: BIRDS, BIRDS, CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT ASSESSMENT MODELS, CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT ASSESSMENT MODELS, DELTAS, All tags...
The western coastline of Alaska spans over 10,000 km of diverse topography ranging from low lying tundra in the north to sharp volcanic relief in the south. Included in this range are areas highly susceptible to powerful storms which can cause coastal flooding, erosion and have many other negative effects on the environment and commercial efforts in the region. In order to better understand the multi-scale and interactive physics of the deep ocean,continental shelf, near shore, and coast, a large unstructured domain hydrodynamic model is being developed using the finite element, free surface circulation code ADCIRC.This model is a high resolution, accurate, and robust computational model of Alaska’s coastal environment...
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