Social-ecological soundscapes: examining aircraft-harvester-caribou conflict in Arctic Alaska

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017As human development expands across the Arctic, it is crucial to carefully assess the impacts to remote natural ecosystems and to indigenous communities that rely on wild resources for nutritional and cultural wellbeing. Because indigenous communities and wildlife populations are interdependent, assessing how human activities impact traditional harvest practices can advance our understanding of the human dimensions of wildlife management. Indigenous communities across Arctic Alaska have expressed concern over the last four decades that low-flying aircraft interfere with their traditional harvest practices. For example, communities often have testified that aircraft disturb caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and thereby reduce harvest opportunities. Despite this longstanding concern, little research exists on the extent of aircraft activity in Arctic Alaska and on how aircraft affect the behavior and perceptions of harvesters. Therefore, the overarching goal of my research was to highlight the importance of aircraft-harvester conflict in Arctic Alaska and begin to address the issue using a scientific and community-driven approach. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that conflict between aircraft and indigenous harvesters in Arctic Alaska is a widespread, understudied, and complex issue. By conducting a meta-analysis of the available literature, I quantified the deficiency of scientific knowledge about the impacts of aircraft on rural communities and traditional harvest practices in the Arctic. My results indicated that no peer-reviewed literature has addressed the conflict between low-flying aircraft and traditional harvesters in Arctic Alaska. I speculated that the scale over which aircraft, rural communities, and wildlife interact limits scientists' ability to determine causal relationships and therefore detracts from their interest in researching the human dimension of this social-ecological system. Innovative research approaches like soundscape ecology could begin to quantify interactions and provide baseline data that may foster mitigation discourses among stakeholders. In Chapter 2, I employed a soundscape-ecology approach to address concerns about aircraft activity expressed by the Alaska Native community of Nuiqsut. Nuiqsut faces the greatest volume of aircraft activity of any community in Arctic Alaska because of its proximity to intensive oil and gas activity. However, information on when and where these aircraft are flying is unavailable to residents, managers, and researchers. I worked closely with Nuiqsut residents to deploy acoustic monitoring systems along important caribou harvest corridors during the peak of caribou harvest, from early June through late August 2016. This method successfully captured aircraft sound and the community embraced my science for addressing local priorities. I found aircraft activity levels near Nuiqsut and surrounding oil developments (12 daily events) to be approximately six times greater than in areas over 30 km from the village (two daily events). Aircraft sound disturbance was 26 times lower in undeveloped areas (Noise Free Interval =13 hrs) than near human development (NFI = 0.5 hrs). My study provided baseline data on aircraft activity and noise levels. My research could be used by stakeholders and managers to develop conflict avoidance agreements and minimize interference with traditional harvest practices. Soundscape methods could be adapted to rural regions across Alaska that may be experiencing conflict with aircraft or other sources of noise that disrupt human-wildlife interactions. By quantifying aircraft activity using a soundscape approach, I demonstrated a novel application of an emerging field in ecology and provided the first scientific data on one dimension of a larger social-ecological system. Future soundscape studies should be integrated with research on both harvester and caribou behaviors to understand how the components within this system are interacting over space and time. Understanding the long-term impacts to traditional harvest practices will require integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts that collaborate with communities and other relevant stakeholders. Finally, my research will likely spark efforts to monitor and mitigate aircraft impacts to wildlife populations and traditional harvest practices across Alaska, helping to inform a decision-making process currently hindered by an absence of objective data

Evaluating Differences in Household Subsistence Harvest Patterns between the Ambler Project and Non-Project Zones

Western Alaska is one of largest inhabited, roadless areas in North America and, indeed, the world. Access, via a new road that would transverse Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (GAAR), to a mining district in a vast roadless section of northwest Alaska has been proposed. Given the potential effects of the road on nearby communities, we analyzed how communities connected to the road system compare to their unconnected counterparts. Specifically, using zero inflated negative binomial models, we analyzed subsistence harvest data to understand factors that influence subsistence production at the household level. We found substantial difference in these factors between communities near the proposed road (project zone (PZ) communities and a comparable set of road accessible communities outside the region, and were affected by household characteristics such as the gender of the head of household, number of children, and income. Total subsistence production of project zone communities was 1.8 – 2.5 times greater than that of non-project zone communities. Communities with a higher percentage of Alaska Native residents had greater per capita subsistence harvests. Higher household income levels were associated with lower subsistence harvest levels. Roads can provide access for hunters from outside the region to traditional subsistence hunting grounds used by local residents that would not be very accessible if not for the road. Our proxy for competition (number of nonlocal moose hunters) indicates that resident moose harvest amounts are inversely related to the number of hunters in a particular area. If subsistence harvest patterns for project zone communities currently off the road changed to mirror existing non-project zone harvests due to the road, the financial cost would be USD $6,900 – 10,500 per household per year (assuming an$8/lb. ‘replacement’ cost for subsistence harvests). This represents about 33% of the median household income. Taken together, our results suggest that the proposed road should be expected to substantially impact subsistence production in communities that are not currently connected to the road system. The scale of our data did not allow for the comparison of the impacts of the different proposed routes but the impacts of different routes is likely minor in relation to the presence or absence of the proposed roadFigures / Tables / Abstract/Executive Summary / Acknowledgments / Introduction / The Proposed Road and Mine / Study Area / Communities / Background / Modeling Household Harvest / Conclusions / Literature CitedYe

iRFP is a real time marker for transformation based assays in high content screening

Anchorage independent growth is one of the hallmarks of oncogenic transformation. Here we show that infrared fluorescent protein (iRFP) based assays allow accurate and unbiased determination of colony formation and anchorage independent growth over time. This protocol is particularly compatible with high throughput systems, in contrast to traditional methods which are often labor-intensive, subjective to bias and do not allow further analysis using the same cells. Transformation in a single layer soft agar assay could be documented as early as 2 to 3 days in a 96 well format, which can be easily combined with standard transfection, infection and compound screening setups to allow for high throughput screening to identify therapeutic targets

Kids Count Alaska 2013-2014

This research was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We thank the foundation for its support, but the findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and not necessarily of the foundation. KIDS COUNT is a nationwide program of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The foundation produces a national data book each year, detailing the condition of America’s children. It also sponsors KIDS COUNT programs in all 50 states. Feel free to copy, distribute, or otherwise use information from the Kids Count Alaska Data Book, citing the source as: Kids Count Alaska 2013-2014 Data Book, prepared by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage, with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.Kids Count Alaska is part of a nationwide program, sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to collect and publicize information about children’s health, safety, education, and economic status. We gather information from many sources and present it in one place, to give Alaskans and others a broad picture of how well the state’s children are doing—and provide parents, policymakers, and others with information they need to improve life for children and families. Our goals are: • Distributing information about the status of Alaska’s children • Creating an informed public, motivated to help children • Comparing the status of children in Alaska with that of children nationwide, but also presenting additional indicators relevant for AlaskaAnnie E. Casey FoundationIntroduction / Infancy / Births and Care Before Birth / Babies With Low Birthweight / Infant Mortality / Economic Well-Being / Children Living in Poverty / Children With No Parent Working Full-Time, Year-Round / Children in Single-Parent Families / Births to Teens / Health Care / Education / Dropout and Graduation Rates / Teens Not in School and Not Working / School Achievement / Children in Danger / Child Death Rate / Teen Death Rate / Child Abuse and Neglect / Juvenile Justic

ISER Working Paper

In communities that largely depend on the extraction of natural resources, attitudes towards conservation and development may seem at odds or particularly rigid. With an unprecedented wealth of natural capital, a growing mining sector, strong oil and gas industry, and a politically conservative population, Alaska serves as a case study to measure such attitudes. This research was motivated by a lack of primary ecosystem service valuation studies in Alaska that could be used to assess the public’s perceived value of ecosystem services in order to guide future land use decisions and incentivize land use decisions that minimize negative externalities. A choice experiment was conducted with 224 households in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the fastest growing region in Alaska and one of the fastest growing regions in the U.S. Rapid development with few restrictions has led to changes for local ecosystems particularly important to salmon, negative effects on access related to recreation and tourism, and caused conversion of valuable farmland. Study results show that attitudes and values vary regarding future land use and economic development efforts. On average, policy action to improve conditions for local salmon stocks are most valuable to local residents followed by protecting farm and ranch lands as well as public access to recreation sites. Conversely, residents show negative preferences towards rapid population growth and developing local mining, oil and gas, and timber resources but support developing a professional and technical services sector. The quantified welfare changes related to different development scenarios show that focusing on conserving valuable ecosystem services is in the public’s best interest

M.A. rural development methodology paper

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 201

Climigration? Population and climate change in Arctic Alaska

Residents of towns and villages in Arctic Alaska live on “the front line of climate change.” Some communities face immediate threats from erosion and flooding associated with thawing permafrost, increasing river flows, and reduced sea ice protection of shorelines. The term climigration, referring to migration caused by climate change, originally was coined for these places. Although initial applications emphasized the need for government relocation policies, it has elsewhere been applied more broadly to encompass unplanned migration as well. Some historical movements have been attributed to climate change, but closer study tends to find multiple causes, making it difficult to quantify the climate contribution. Clearer attribution might come from comparisons of migration rates among places that are similar in most respects, apart from known climatic impacts. We apply this approach using annual 1990–2014 time series on 43 Arctic Alaska towns and villages. Within-community time plots show no indication of enhanced out-migration from the most at-risk communities. More formally, there is no significant difference between net migration rates of at-risk and other places, testing several alternative classifications. Although climigration is not detectable to date, growing risks make either planned or unplanned movements unavoidable in the near future

Conducting rigorous research with subgroups of at-risk youth: lessons learned from a teen pregnancy prevention project in Alaska

In 2010, Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) received federal funding to test an evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program. The grant required a major modification to an existing program and a randomized control trial (RCT) to test its effectiveness. As the major modifications, Alaska used peer educators instead of adults to deliver the program to youth aged 1419 instead of the original curriculum intended age range of 1214. Cultural and approach adaptations were included as well. After 4 years of implementation and data collection, the sample was too small to provide statistically significant results. The lack of findings gave no information about the modification, nor any explanation of how the curriculum was received, or reasons for the small sample. This paper reports on a case study follow-up to the RCT to better understand outcome and implementation results. For this study, researchers reviewed project documents and interviewed peer educators, state and local staff, and evaluators. Three themes emerged from the data: (a) the professional growth of peer educators and development of peer education, (b) difficulties resulting from curriculum content, especially for subpopulations of sexually active youth, youth identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and/or asexual, pregnant, and parenting youth and (c) the appropriateness of an RCT with subpopulations of at-risk youth. Three recommendations emerged from the case study. First, including as many stakeholders as possible in the program and evaluation design phases is essential, and must be supported by appropriate funding streams and training. Second, there must be recognition of the multiple small subpopulations found in Alaska when adapting programs designed for a larger and more homogeneous population. Third, RCTs may not be appropriate for all population subgroups.Ye