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

Are Primary Schools Incorporating Enough Movement Into The Day To Maintain Positive Mental Health In Children?

Schools have endured a shift in regards to academic rigor and the amount of time spent in physical activity. In order to be a top academically performing nation, America has made academic rigor a priority. In order to accommodate the amount of content and rigor, cuts have typically been made to the amount of time spent in recess, physical education and health education classes. Another trend in America is the prevalence of mental health issues in children. When considering the cuts being made in education it is critical to acknowledge the repercussions they may have on mental health. This capstone reviews a plethora of literature to help answer the research question, Are primary schools incorporating enough movement into the day to maintain positive mental health in children? The literature connected the importance of physical activity in maintaining mental health. The research also expounded evidence that many schools are not meeting the physical activity recommendations by grade level

SERVING DIVERSE POPULATIONS IN THE LIBRARY MEDIA PROGRAM

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Farming: It\u27s Not Just for Farmers Anymore

Agricultural education, originally the province of land grant institutions, has recently entered the liberal arts curriculum. This represents a profound shift from the origins of agricultural education, when it was intended primarily as vocational training for future farmers, and has important implications for the future of the American food system. The first chapter of this thesis addresses the history of agricultural education: what was it originally like, and why did it come to be heavily criticized in the late twentieth century? Formal agricultural education changed significantly in response to these criticisms, making it more environmentally sustainable and bringing it into liberal arts institutions. The Pomona College Organic Farm is representative of a broader student farm movement that has gained momentum since the late 1990s, and offers the chance to evaluate agricultural education in the liberal arts. This thesis includes a curriculum in sustainable agriculture that was led as a group independent study at the Pomona College Organic Farm in fall 2013 and reflections on the process of curriculum design and implementation

Chemoenzymatic Assembly of Macrolactones: Merging Synthetic Chemistry with Biocatalysis to Afford Diverse Compound Libraries

Complex secondary metabolites display a wealth of biological activities and, together with their derivatives, have provided over 60% of new pharmaceutical agents over the past 40 years. Despite their clinical success, limitations in isolation yields as well as the synthetic challenges posed by these scaffolds often hinders the medicinal chemistry efforts necessary to overcome suboptimal pharmacological properties, highlighting the need for alternative methods. A promising strategy for generating libraries of natural product analogues is through the use of biosynthetic enzymes. These systems have long been hypothesized to be capable of producing almost unlimited structural diversity, due to their modular nature, however to date, efforts towards PKS engineering have mostly met with failure. Despite notable successes, decreased product yields and/or failure to produce the desired structures entirely have stymied these efforts. Recent studies focusing on the interrogation of single modules or module domains via biochemical analysis coupled with structural determination have begun to shed light on these complex systems and give us insight into the reasons for the initial failures. The studies presented in this thesis focus on investigations into the structural and mechanistic parameters that govern selectivity in the biosynthetic enzymes of interest from two key natural products, the PKS/NRPS derived cryptophycin family of anticancer agents, and the PKS antibiotic Pikromycin. In the cryptophycin system, synthetic chain elongation intermediates have been coupled with the Crp TE macrocyclizing catalyst to produce a library of heterocyclic unit A analogues. This was met with remarkable success as all the analogues were processed by the TE with similar or greater efficiency than that seen with the native substrate. Current efforts are focused on gaining an NMR structure of this TE with hopes of shedding light on the underlying catalytic mechanism that makes this enzyme so versatile. This facilitated the biological evaluation of these analogues, allowing us to identify one that displays remarkable activity without the presence of an epoxide group that was previously thought to be necessary for maximum efficacy. Utilizing the same strategy in the Pikromycin system, five new pentaketides analogues were generated that could be used with three separate intact PKS modules, the PikAIII-TE and the coupled PikAIII/AIV system. These synthetic intermediates have continued to lend credence to the hypothesis that in PKS systems, the TE tends to be the deciding factor on whether hydrolytic byproducts are formed or macrocycles. Utilizing our biocatalytic platform we have been able to show that the TE can more effectively produce 14 membered macrolactones containing unnatural functionality than 12, leading to the isolation of three new macrolactone products. Altered alkyl chain substituents on these pentaketides substrates have also shed light on the likelihood of a size restriction for the loading of these substrates onto the KS domain of the initial module. The continued investigation of these substrates as well as others continues to build the groundwork for future engineering campaigns aimed at generating more flexible catalysts for the production of novel natural product analogues.PHDMedicinal ChemistryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147609/1/jejschmi_1.pd

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

Ecological And Social Influences On Population Dynamics And Genetics Of Moose In Alaska

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2007I examined social and ecological influences on moose (Alces alces gigas) in Alaska, USA, with respect to hunting success, antler size, and population genetic structure. Catch per unit effort (CPUE) is frequently used to assess hunter success; thus I hypothesized that landscape characteristics and moose density would affect success. Using hunter harvest tickets returned to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, I modeled CPUE with Weibull regression. I determined success is significantly predicted by hunt location, mode of transportation, hunting regulations, use of commercial services (i.e., guides), year, road density, hunter-to-moose ratio, moose density, and hunter residency status. Antler size is an important factor for hunters and for mating potential in male moose. I hypothesized that moose density, habitat, and use of guides would correlate with antler size of harvested moose. I also predicted that guides would harvest moose with larger antlers and avoid areas where the hunter-to-moose ratio is high compared to nonguided hunters. Results indicated that antler size decreases with increases in moose density and harvest intensity due to density-dependent processes and a younger age structure in heavily harvested areas. Guided hunts tended to harvest larger antlered bulls and avoided areas of high hunter-to-moose ratios. In addition to age and nutrition, genetics influences antler size. I used eight microsatellites and five sample areas to resolve whether population structure exists among moose in Alaska. I hypothesized that population structure does exist given the intense harvest rates, polygynous mating style of moose, and heterogeneous landscape present in Alaska. Dispersal and gene flow between populations was proposed to occur via isolation-by-distance (IBD) with a positive linear relationship between geographic and genetic distance. Results indicated weak but significant population structure for moose in Alaska, and IBD was supported. Pairwise comparisons between populations indicated that moose have established separate populations except for between Tanana Flats and Koyukuk and Koyukuk and the Seward Peninsula. Lastly, I hypothesized incorporation of landscape characteristics and subsequent least-cost path would strengthen the significance of IBD. With an additional population, Tetlin, the significance of IBD as a mechanism for dispersal/gene flow for moose in Alaska was improved