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The global mean surface temperature increased 0.85°C during the period 1880 – 2012. Some climate models predict an additional warming of up 2 to 4 ◦ C over the next 100 years for the primary breeding grounds for North American ducks. Such an increase has been predicted to reduce mid - continent breeding duck populations by >70%. Managing continental duck populations in the face of climate change requires understanding how waterfowl have responded to historical spatio - temporal climatic variation. However, such responses to climate may be obscured by how ducks respond to variation in land cover. We estimated effects of climate on settlement patterns of breeding ducks in the Prairie - Parkland Region (PPR), boreal...
Berry Risk Mapping and Modeling of Native and exotic defoliators in Alaska is a jointly funded project between the Alaska Climate Science Center and the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative.
Snow conditions are extremely important to a wide range of hydrologic and ecosystem components and processes, including those related to surface energy and moisture stores and fluxes, vegetation, mammals, birds, and fish. The required snow datasets currently do not exist at the required spatial and temporal resolutions needed by end users such as scientists, land managers, and policy makers.
While there has been rapid advancement in the development and application of statistical downscaling methods for climate projection, determining the best predictive large-scale climate information for the targeted local climate variable remains a challenge. The choice of predictor variables is one of the most influential steps of model development and has the potential to lead to varying results, contributing to the total uncertainty of future projections. Despite being a well-known problem, predictor selection often does not receive adequate attention and the development of a straightforward and feasible prescreening process is needed to provide guidance to simple (e.g., linear regression) and complex (e.g., machine...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The rapid loss of arctic sea ice is forcing a larger proportion of the Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear (Ursus maritimus) population to spend more time on land, increasing chances of negative interactions between people and bears. In the United States, the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) protects polar bears from incidental disturbance from human activities. For the remote and roadless areas of northern Alaska, USA, effective management of small aircraft activity is necessary to limit disturbance, but effects of overflights on polar bear behavior are largely unknown. During 2021 and 2022, we intentionally exposed polar bears (n = 115) to systematic aircraft activity (helicopter, fixed-wing) until we observed...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Wiley): Snow avalanches are a natural hazard in mountainous areas worldwide with severe impacts that include fatalities, damage to infrastructure, disruption to commerce, and landscape disturbance. Understanding long-term avalanche frequency patterns, and associated climate and weather influences, improves our understanding of how climate change may affect avalanche activity. We used dendrochronological techniques to evaluate the historical frequency of large magnitude avalanches (LMAs) in the high-latitude climate of southeast Alaska, United States. We collected 434 cross sections throughout six avalanche paths near Juneau, Alaska. This resulted in 2706 identified avalanche growth disturbances between...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The melting cryosphere adds heterogeneity to the abiotic and biotic characteristics of many high latitude and montane rivers. However, climate change threatens the cryosphere's persistence in many regions. While existing research has explored the impacts of cryospheric loss on the diversity and structure of freshwater communities, implications for functional traits of communities, such as production of aquatic invertebrates, remain unresolved. Here, we quantified aquatic invertebrate community structure and secondary production in southeast Alaska (USA) streams that represent a meltwater to non-meltwater gradient, including streams fed primarily by: (1) glacier-melt, (2) snowmelt, (3) rainfall, and (4) a combination...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This report describes the progress made by the Integrated Ecosystem Model (IEM) for Alaska and Northwest Canada Project for the full duration of the project (September 1, 2011 through August 31, 2016).This primary goal in this project was to develop the IEM modeling framework to integrate the driving components for and the interactions among disturbance regimes, permafrost dynamics, hydrology, and vegetation succession/migration for Alaska and Northwest Canada. The major activities of the project include (1) development and delivery of input data sets, (2) model coupling, (3) evaluation and applications of fire and vegetation dynamics, (4) evaluation and application of ecosystem carbon and energy balance, (5) evaluation...
The associated uncertainties of future climate projections are one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in studies exploring the potential regional impacts of future climate shifts. In remote and climatically complex regions, the limited number of available downscaled projections may not provide an accurate representation of the underlying uncertainty in future climate or the possible range of potential scenarios. Consequently, global downscaled projections are now some of the most widely used climate datasets in the world. However, they are rarely examined for representativeness of local climate or the plausibility of their projected changes. Here we explore the utility of two such global datasets (CHELSA and WorldClim2)...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JF003539/abstract): A quantitative understanding of snow thickness and snow water equivalent (SWE) on glaciers is essential to a wide range of scientific and resource management topics. However, robust SWE estimates are observationally challenging, in part because SWE can vary abruptly over short distances in complex terrain due to interactions between topography and meteorological processes. In spring 2013, we measured snow accumulation on several glaciers around the Gulf of Alaska using both ground- and helicopter-based ground-penetrating radar surveys, complemented by extensive ground truth observations. We found that SWE can be highly variable (40%...
Shellfish harvesting is central to coastal Alaska Native ways of life, and tribes in Southeast Alaska are committed to preserving sustainable and safe access to subsistence foods. However, consumption of non-commercially harvested shellfish puts Alaska Native communities at elevated risk of exposure to shellfish toxins. To address a lack of state or federal toxin testing for subsistence and recreational harvesting, tribes across Southeast Alaska have formed their own toxin testing and ocean monitoring program. In this study, we interviewed environmental managers responsible for tribes' testing and others with shellfish toxin expertise to report on perceptions of barriers to tribally led testing in Southeast Alaska....
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Streamflow controls many freshwater and marine processes, including salinity profiles, sediment composition, fluxes of nutrients, and the timing of animal migrations. Watersheds that border the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) comprise over 400,000 km2 of largely pristine freshwater habitats and provide ecosystem services such as reliable fisheries for local and global food production. Yet no comprehensive watershed‐scale description of current temporal and spatial patterns of streamflow exists within the coastal GOA. This is an immediate need because the spatial distribution of future streamflow patterns may shift dramatically due to warming air temperature, increased rainfall, diminishing snowpack, and rapid glacial recession....
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Background. Wild berries are a valued traditional food in Alaska. Phytochemicals in wild berries may contribute to the prevention of vascular disease, cancer and cognitive decline, making berry consumption important to community health in rural areas. Little was known regarding which species of berries were important to Alaskan communities, the number of species typically picked in communities and whether recent environmental change has affected berry abundance or quality. Objective. To identify species of wild berries that were consumed by people in different ecological regions of Alaska and to determine if perceived berry abundance was changing for some species or in some regions. Design. We asked tribal environmental...
Snow is a major, climate-sensitive feature of the Earth’s surface and catalyst of fundamentally important ecosystem processes. Understanding how snow influences sentinel species in rapidly changing mountain ecosystems is particularly critical. Whereas effects of snow on food availability, energy expenditure, and predation are well documented, we report how avalanches exert major impacts on an ecologically significant mountain ungulate - the coastal Alaskan mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus). Using long-term GPS data and field observations across four populations (421 individuals over 17 years), we show that avalanches caused 23−65% of all mortality, depending on area. Deaths varied seasonally and were directly...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/5/055005): Glacier ecosystems are a significant source of bioavailable, yet ancient dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Characterizing DOC in Mendenhall Glacier outflow (southeast Alaska) we document a seasonal persistence to the radiocarbon-depleted signature of DOC, highlighting ancient DOC as a ubiquitous feature of glacier outflow. We observed no systematic depletion in Δ 14 C-DOC with increasing discharge during the melt season that would suggest mobilization of an aged subglacial carbon store. However, DOC concentration, δ 13 C-DOC, Δ 14 C-DOC and fluorescence signatures appear to have been influenced by runoff from vegetated hillslopes above the glacier...
Pulsed subsidy events create ephemeral fluxes of hyper-abundant resources that can shape annual patterns of consumption and growth for recipient consumers. However, environmental conditions strongly affect local resource availability for much of the year, and can heavily impact consumer foraging and growth patterns prior to pulsed subsidy events. Thus, a consumer's capacity to exploit pulse subsidy resources may be influenced by antecedent environmental conditions, but this has rarely been shown in nature and is unknown in aquatic ecosystems. Here, we sought to understand the importance of hydrologic variation and a salmon pulse subsidy on the foraging and growth patterns of two stream salmonids in a coastal southeast...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Glacial lakes can form and grow due to glacial retreat, and rapid lake drainage can produce destructive floods. Outburst flood compilations show a temporal increase in frequency; however, recent studies highlight the role of observational bias, creating uncertainty about current and future glacial-lake hazards. Here, we focus on the Alaska region, which generated a third of previously documented outbursts globally. Using multitemporal satellite imagery, we documented 1150 drainages from 106 ice-dammed lakes between 1985 and 2020. Documented events became more frequent over time, however, accounting for increasing image availability reveals no significant increase occurred. Most lakes decreased in area and volume,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address the negative consequences of contemporary fire use. When applied as a communication and translation tool, there is potential...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation