Adapting to Environmental and Social Change: Subsistence in Three Aleutian Communities

Our surroundings and society are both constantly evolving. Some changes are due to natural processes. People are responsible for other changes, because of what we do—for example, increasing the size of the population, expanding technology, and increasing mobility and connectivity. And some changes—like climate change—are due to a combination of natural processes and actions of people. In the Arctic, including the Aleutian Islands, marine and coastal ecosystems have seen the largest number of regime shifts with direct and indirect consequences for subsistence activities, commercial fisheries, and coastal communities (Council 2016). This paper describes current subsistence activities and changes local residents have observed over time in three Aleutian Island communities—Akutan, Nikolski, and Atka. As described more later, we did initial household surveys in 2016 and a second round in 2017, as well as more detailed interviews with some residents

A Case Study of the Pebble Exploration Project

Institute of Social and Economic Research • University of Alaska Anchorage • January 2017 From 2002 until 2013, the Pebble Mineral Exploration Project explored a big deposit of mostly copper, but also gold and molybdenum, in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska, about 17 miles northwest of Illiamna (Figure S-2). That exploration stopped in 2013, when a major project partner withdrew. But before that, developers spent millions of dollars, and in the last years of exploration annually employed more than a hundred residents of Bristol Bay communities. This paper describes jobs and income the residents of 18 communities—in the Lake and Peninsula Borough, the Bristol Bay Borough, and the Dillingham census area—got from 2009 through 2012, the last full year of exploration. Most residents of these communities are Alaska Native, and the communities are small—most with populations considerably smaller than 500— except for Dillingham, where nearly 2,500 people live (Table S-1). How local communities can capture more economic benefits from rural resource projects is an important question in Alaska, and the Pebble exploration project offers a useful case study. But we want to emphasize that we’re neither advocating nor opposing a potential mine at the Pebble site. The proposed mine has been enormously controversial in Alaska and elsewhere, because of its proximity to the world-class Bristol Bay salmon fisheries. We looked only at local jobs and income exploration created, to shed light on the potential for resource development projects to help rural economies. Our analysis is based on data from Pebble Limited Partnership’s exploration-site database, augmented with information from contractors. What did we find? • About 43% of those who worked at the Pebble exploration site anytime from 2009 through 2012 were from the Bristol Bay area. That amounted to about 300 local residents who worked at the site some time during the study period (and may have held more than one job over the years). Another 37% of workers were from elsewhere in Alaska, and the remaining 20% were mainly from other states or Canada (Figure S-1). • The number of workers from Bristol Bay increased over the study period, and so did employee retention. In 2009, 111 local residents worked at the Pebble site, increasing to 157 by 2012. More employees also stayed on the job from one year to the next, with retention at just over half from 2009 to 2010, climbing to two-thirds from 2011 to 2012 (Figure S-3). • Bristol Bay residents worked at 56 kinds of jobs in the study period, almost all seasonal. The most common jobs they held were drill helper, bear guard, and skilled laborer. The average hourly pay was about $19, and most workers earned on average about$15,000 a year from those mostly seasonal jobs. About 65% of workers were men and 35% women (Figure S-3). 2 • Communities closest to the exploration site got several times more jobs and income than those farther away. We grouped the study communities into three regions, based on their proximity to Pebble. Communities closest to the site are mostly around Lake Iliamna, and on average per year about 100 workers came from what we call the Lakes region. About 25 a year were from the 3 Intermediate region and 8 from the Distant. On average, workers from the Lakes region collected a total of nearly $1.5 million a year, compared with$499,000 for those from the Intermediate region and $100,000 among those from the Distant region, where communities are more than 100 miles from the Pebble site (Figures S-2 and S-4). • In the Lakes region, where communities are very small (Table S-1) exploration employment was a large share of total employment: approximately 14% of the total workforce from Lakes communities worked at the site during the study period. The regions farther from the exploration site, which have larger populations, saw much smaller employment effects: 3% of the total workforce from the Intermediate region and barely above 0% from the Distant region. • Even within individual regions, community employment at Pebble varied significantly. Iliamna, where exploration operations were based, and Newhalen (with road access to Iliamna) had the most employees—an annual average of 40 in Newhalen and about 25 in Iliamna, followed by Nondalton with about 16. Outside the Lakes region, the only community with more than an average of 10 workers a year was Koliganek. But even within the Lakes region, not all communities had a significant number of workers—Port Alsworth and Pedro Bay had fewer workers than some places in the Distant region (Figure S-5). 4 • To get a sense of what Pebble income meant to the region, we compared it with income from two important sources: commercial fishing and Permanent Fund dividends. The exploration project brought more income into the Lakes region from 2009 through 2012 than did either commercial salmon fishing or Permanent Fund dividends. But the Intermediate and Distant regions have more people, rely more on salmon fishing, and had fewer residents working at Pebble—so Pebble pay in those regions was a much smaller source of income. As Figure S-6 shows, income from Pebble in the Lakes region from 2009-2012 was several times more than from salmon fishing and two-thirds more than from Permanent Fund dividends. By contrast, in the Intermediate region Pebble pay was significantly less that from either commercial fishing or PFDs—and in the Distant region it was an insignificant amount compared with the other sources. What can the Pebble case study tell us about the potential for rural development projects to benefit local economies? • Residents of Bristol Bay communities and other Alaska places were able to capture a big share of exploration jobs and income. During the study period, 43% of workers were from Bristol Bay communities and another 37% were from elsewhere in Alaska. A number of things contributed to this high local-hire rate, including Pebble’s local hire coordinator; its work with the state government to get training programs and with non-profits to help qualify local residents for jobs; and its contracts with local Native village corporations and other businesses. • Jobs and income going to Bristol Bay residents increased significantly between 2009 and 2012. Partly that’s because the developer was spending more for exploration, creating more jobs. But the number of qualified job applicants from the Bristol Bay region also increased over time. Pebble personnel report that by 2010 or 2011, there were more qualified Bristol Bay residents looking for jobs than there were jobs available. • Proximity made a difference: even though most project employees from all communities were housed at project headquarters in Iliamna, residents from the villages closest to the project site got more jobs. From 2009 through 2012, an average of about 100 residents per year from the Lakes region worked at the project site—about 14% of the total workforce from seven small villages. Prospective workers from places farther away may have taken into account how difficult it would be to travel home for time off workExecutive Summary / Background / Methodology / Community Workforce / Community Effects / Appendice

Transitions of social-ecological subsistence systems in the Arctic

Transitions of social-ecological systems (SES) expose governance systems to new challenges. This is particularly so in the Arctic where resource systems are increasingly subjected to global warming, industrial development and globalization which subsequently alter the local SES dynamics. Based on common-pool resource theory, we developed a dynamic conceptual model explaining how exogenous drivers might alter a traditional subsistence system from a provisioning to an appropriation actions situation. In a provisioning action situation the resource users do not control the resource level but adapt to the fluctuating availability of resources, and the collective challenge revolve around securing the subsistence in the community. An increased harvest pressure enabled by exogenous drivers could transform the SES to an appropriation action situation where the collective challenge has changed to avoid overuse of a common-pool resource. The model was used as a focal lens to investigate the premises for broad-scale transitions of subsistence-oriented SESs in Arctic Alaska, Canada and Greenland. We synthesized data from documents, official statistics and grey and scientific literature to explore the different components of our model. Our synthesis suggests that the traditional Arctic subsistence SESs mostly comply with a provisioning action situation. Despite population growth and available technology; urbanization, increased wage labor and importation of food have reduced the resource demand, and we find no evidence for a broad-scale transition to an appropriation action situation throughout the Western Arctic. However, appropriation challenges have emerged in some cases either as a consequence of commercialization of the resource or by severely reduced resource stocks due to various exogenous drivers. Future transitions of SESs could be triggered by the emergence of commercial local food markets and Arctic warming. In particular, Arctic warming is an intensifying exogenous driver that is threatening many important Arctic wildlife resources inflicting increased appropriation challenges to the governance of local harvest.Ye

Measuring and Correcting Response Heaping Arising From the Use of Prototypes

Imprecision in respondent recall can cause response heaping in frequency data for particular values (e.g., 5, 10, 15). In human dimensions research, heaping can occur for variables such as days of participation (e.g., hunting, fishing), animals/fish harvested, or money spent on licenses. Distributions with heaps can bias population estimates because the means and totals can be inflated or deflated. Because bias can result in poor management decisions, determining if the bias is large enough to matter is important. This note introduces the logic and flow of a deheaping program that estimates bias in means and totals when people use approximate responses (i.e., prototypes). The program can make estimates even when spikes occur due to bag limits. The program is available online, and smooths heaps at multiples of 5 (numbers ending in 5 and 0) and 7 (e.g., 7, 14, 21), and produces standard deviations in estimates

Agricultural management and plant selection interactively affect rhizosphere microbial community structure and nitrogen cycling.

BACKGROUND:Rhizosphere microbial communities are key regulators of plant performance, yet few studies have assessed the impact of different management approaches on the rhizosphere microbiomes of major crops. Rhizosphere microbial communities are shaped by interactions between agricultural management and host selection processes, but studies often consider these factors individually rather than in combination. We tested the impacts of management (M) and rhizosphere effects (R) on microbial community structure and co-occurrence networks of maize roots collected from long-term conventionally and organically managed maize-tomato agroecosystems. We also explored the interaction between these factors (M × R) and how it impacts rhizosphere microbial diversity and composition, differential abundance, indicator taxa, co-occurrence network structure, and microbial nitrogen-cycling processes. RESULTS:Host selection processes moderate the influence of agricultural management on rhizosphere microbial communities, although bacteria and fungi respond differently to plant selection and agricultural management. We found that plants recruit management-system-specific taxa and shift N-cycling pathways in the rhizosphere, distinguishing this soil compartment from bulk soil. Rhizosphere microbiomes from conventional and organic systems were more similar in diversity and network structure than communities from their respective bulk soils, and community composition was affected by both M and R effects. In contrast, fungal community composition was affected only by management, and network structure only by plant selection. Quantification of six nitrogen-cycling genes (nifH, amoA [bacterial and archaeal], nirK, nrfA, and nosZ) revealed that only nosZ abundance was affected by management and was higher in the organic system. CONCLUSIONS:Plant selection interacts with conventional and organic management practices to shape rhizosphere microbial community composition, co-occurrence patterns, and at least one nitrogen-cycling process. Reframing research priorities to better understand adaptive plant-microbe feedbacks and include roots as a significant moderating influence of management outcomes could help guide plant-oriented strategies to improve productivity and agroecosystem sustainability

The small-scale dynamo: Breaking universality at high Mach numbers

(Abridged) The small-scale dynamo may play a substantial role in magnetizing the Universe under a large range of conditions, including subsonic turbulence at low Mach numbers, highly supersonic turbulence at high Mach numbers and a large range of magnetic Prandtl numbers Pm, i.e. the ratio of kinetic viscosity to magnetic resistivity. Low Mach numbers may in particular lead to the well-known, incompressible Kolmogorov turbulence, while for high Mach numbers, we are in the highly compressible regime, thus close to Burgers turbulence. In this study, we explore whether in this large range of conditions, a universal behavior can be expected. Our starting point are previous investigations in the kinematic regime. Here, analytic studies based on the Kazantsev model have shown that the behavior of the dynamo depends significantly on Pm and the type of turbulence, and numerical simulations indicate a strong dependence of the growth rate on the Mach number of the flow. Once the magnetic field saturates on the current amplification scale, backreactions occur and the growth is shifted to the next-larger scale. We employ a Fokker-Planck model to calculate the magnetic field amplification during the non-linear regime, and find a resulting power-law growth that depends on the type of turbulence invoked. For Kolmogorov turbulence, we confirm previous results suggesting a linear growth of magnetic energy. For more general turbulent spectra, where the turbulent velocity v_t scales with the characteristic length scale as u_\ell\propto \ell^{\vartheta}, we find that the magnetic energy grows as (t/T_{ed})^{2\vartheta/(1-\vartheta)}, with t the time-coordinate and T_{ed} the eddy-turnover time on the forcing scale of turbulence. For Burgers turbulence, \vartheta=1/2, a quadratic rather than linear growth may thus be expected, and a larger timescale until saturation is reached.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted at New Journal of Physics (NJP

Field Evaluation of Herbicides on Small Fruit, Vegetable, and Ornamental Crops, 1997

Growers generally use herbicides to efficiently produce high-quality fruit and vegetables for processing or fresh market sales. Due to the smaller acreage of these crops compared to major field crops, fewer herbicides are registered for use in fruit and vegetable crops than for field crops. Each year, new herbicides are evaluated under Arkansas growing conditions with the objective of improving the herbicide technology for the grower, processor, and ultimately the consumer. This report includes studies on the control of many of the more serious weed problems in important crops of this region, including snapbeans, spinach, southern pea, watermelon, cantaloupe, tomato, blackberry, and grape. In addition, the report includes information on the tolerance of selected bedding plants to some effective herbicides

Cybrary Support for Learning, Teaching and Research at The University of Queensland - the 1998 University of the Year

The Library has taken a leadership role in addressing the real needs of students in the 21st Century. It is working collaboratively with students and staff to meet their learning and teaching needs as new technological and service possibilities become available. The Library has integrated new web developments with traditional services to create Australia's first Cybrary - a 'virtual library' in a 'wired university'. The Cybrary is an indispensable, integrated approach to meet the information demands of lifelong learning and problem based teaching. It is a powerful support for flexible learning and an enhancement to flexible teaching. The University of Queensland Library has traditionally been an early adopter of technology. In the early 1970s online databases were searched for clients; then an electronic catalogue was introduced. When CD-ROM technology opened up the world of enduser access to electronic bibliographic databases the Library was among the first to provide its clients with these products. As a proactive electronic service provider, the Library has adopted and utilized Internet and Web technology as a vehicle to provide better service to its clients. As a result of its prompt and innovative adoption of leading edge technologies the Library has developed the Cybrary. The services offered through the Cybrary support the complex and varied learning journeys that both students and staff undertake in the current educational environment. Students and staff are able to control their own research and learning to a degree not known before. Last year the Library was recognised for its innovative Cybrary services when it jointly won the highly regarded Institutional Award for Services to Australian Students in the Australian Awards for University Teaching. The paper describes the Cybrary's components and the challenges faced in its implementation