Peatlands, which account for approximately 15% of land surface across the arctic and boreal regions of the globe, are experiencing a range of ecological impacts as a result of climate change. Factors that include altered hydrology resulting from drought and permafrost thaw, rising temperatures, and elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been shown to cause plant community compositional changes. Shifts in plant composition affect the productivity, species diversity, and carbon cycling of peatlands. We used hyperspectral remote sensing to characterize the response of boreal peatland plant composition and species diversity to warming, hydrologic change, and elevated CO2. Hyperspectral remote sensing techniques offer the ability to complete landscape-scale analyses of ecological responses to climate disturbance when paired with plot-level measurements that link ecosystem biophysical properties with spectral reflectance signatures. Working within two large ecosystem manipulation experiments, we examined climate controls on composition and diversity in two types of common boreal peatlands: a nutrient rich fen located at the Alaska Peatland Experiment (APEX) in central Alaska, and an ombrotrophic bog located in northern Minnesota at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) experiment. We found a strong effect of plant functional cover on spectral reflectance characteristics. We also found a positive relationship between species diversity and spectral variation at the APEX field site, which is consistent with other recently published findings. Based on the results of our field study, we performed a supervised land cover classification analysis on an aerial hyperspectral dataset to map peatland plant functional types (PFTs) across an area encompassing a range of different plant communities. Our results underscore recent advances in the application of remote sensing measurements to ecological research, particularly in far northern ecosystems.
more »
« less
Alaska Native Responses to Climate Change: The Role of Community Values in Housing Adaptation
The Arctic is experiencing intensified impacts from climate change, resulting in
unprecedented rates of change, especially for Indigenous communities. Alaska Natives are
experiencing transformations in housing, food security, economic stability, and cultural
practices as a result of the biophysical changes such as thawing permafrost and coastal
erosion. In response, communities are prioritizing adaptation. Although Indigenous
communities have been adapting for hundreds of years, adaptation strategies, or actions
that seek to moderate harm through the adjustment to actual or expected climate change
effects, are not well documented. Housing adaptation strategies are especially
understudied, which include any adaptation strategy that is in response to or in preparation
for a biophysical change affecting housing. Housing adaptation strategies in response to
climate change are primarily focused on physical dimensions (e.g., retrofitting homes,
constructing sea wall). Nevertheless, adaptations to changes in biophysical systems are
closely interlinked to sociocultural systems, which are often neglected in adaptation
discourse. Analyzing existing strategies through the lens of community values captures the
sociocultural aspects of adaptation and is critical for sustainable adaptation. This paper
presents a research design that addresses these gaps in adaptation discourse by asking: How
are community values represented in housing adaptation strategies in response to climate
change? This research will employ interviews, focus groups, and observations in
partnership with two Alaska Native communities in Oscarville, Alaska and Point Lay,
Alaska using community based participatory research methods (CBPR). Understanding
the role of community values in housing adaptation is essential for developing sustainable
adaptation plans, engineering designs, and future research studies. Further, employing
CBPR methodologies in the context of adaptation, grounds identified strategies and
resulting plans in community experience. As a result, future findings will not only
contribute to the intellectual understanding of adaptation processes and theory, but also
facilitate actions in response to climate change.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1928105
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10208061
- Editor(s):
- Chinowsky, P; Taylor, J; Tech, G.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Engineering Project Organization Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
more » « less
Abstract Background Although anthropogenic climate change poses existential challenges for Indigenous communities in the Arctic, these challenges are not entirely unprecedented. Over many generations, Arctic peoples have developed a wide range of behavioral strategies to navigate environmental change and uncertainty, and these strategies provide a foundation for contemporary adaptation.
Aims In this article, we focus on mixed cash‐subsistence economies and the social networks that underlie them in Alaska. The patterns of food production, labor exchange, and food sharing in subsistence‐oriented communities throughout Alaska are driven by the productivity of keystone households who regularly harvest and share resources within and between communities.
Materials & Methods Building on previous research suggesting the critical importance of these networks to community resilience, we use network analysis to investigate whether patterns in resource transfers between households are associated with subsistence harvest diversity—the diversity of species harvested by a household unit. We use exponential random graph models to describe the structure of a sharing network from Aniak, Alaska, and model the links between harvest productivity, harvest diversity, and household position in this network.
Results Our results indicate that both productivity and diversity are positively associated with network connections, and that productivity alone provides an incomplete model of network structure.
Discussion We suggest that subsistence harvest diversity may play a unique role in supporting adaptive capacity and resilience by maintaining the productivity of keystone households despite changing environments and sustaining social network structures that circulate resources throughout the community. Harvest diversity may also serve as a broad indicator of Indigenous ecological knowledge and a tangible representation of cultural practices, values, and worldviews that underlie subsistence in Alaska.
Conclusion Greater attention to harvest diversity is important for understanding how subsistence networks adapt to environmental change and uncertainty linked to social and ecological dynamics of anthropogenic climate change.
-
Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security.more » « less
-
There has been a growth in the number of composite indicator tools used to assess community risk, vulnerability, and resilience, to assist study and policy planning. However, existing research shows that these composite indicators vary extensively in method, selected variables, aggregation methods, and sample size. The result is a plethora of qualitative and quantitative composite indices to choose from. Despite each providing valuable location-based information about specific communities and their qualities, the results of studies, each using disparate methods, cannot easily be integrated for use in decision making, given the different index attributes and study locations. Like many regions in the world, the Arctic is experiencing increased variability in temperatures as a direct consequence of a changing planetary climate. Cascading effects of changes in permafrost are poorly characterized, thus limiting response at multiple scales. We offer that by considering the spatial interaction between the effects of permafrost, infrastructure, and diverse patterns of community characteristics, existing research using different composite indices and frameworks can be augmented. We used a system-science and place-based knowledge approach that accounts for sub-system and cascade impacts through a proximity model of spatial interaction. An estimated ‘permafrost vulnerability surface’ was calculated across Alaska using two existing indices: relevant infrastructure and permafrost extent. The value of this surface in 186 communities and 30 military facilities was extracted and ordered to match the numerical rankings of the Denali Commission in their assessment of permafrost threat, allowing accurate comparison between the permafrost threat ranks and the PVI rankings. The methods behind the PVI provide a tool that can incorporate multiple risk, resilience, and vulnerability indices to aid adaptation planning, especially where large-scale studies with good geographic sample distribution using the same criteria and methods do not exist.more » « less
-
This paper explores the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about emerging hazards, environmental change, and relocation among community groups in Utqiaġvik (Barrow) of the North Slope Borough (NSB), Alaska. This region has been experiencing accelerating erosion and warmer temperatures, permafrost thawing, more frequent and intense storm surges, and increased maritime traffic and extractive industries with ice loss, with direct or cascading effects on the mixed ethnic and indigenous communities. This paper used engagement activities (Participatory Applied Theater) and qualitative approaches (focus groups) during three consecutive summers 2016–2018 to evaluate the risk perceptions and interpretations towards coastal changes and relocation as an adaptive response in this U.S. strategic yet remote location. Each focus group session started with risk ranking activities about regional hazards to assess knowledge and perceptions of risk, followed by an interactive script reading of an Iñupiat disaster legend to facilitate discussion about risk reduction options and engagement with the survey questions. Focus groups were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using qualitative data analysis software Nvivo and a hybrid coding strategy. Results indicate that relocation is considered by some participants but is not planned for nor implemented by community groups, families, or the local government to reduce the hazard risks. However, widespread recognition of accelerated hazards and environmental changes, and the need for adaptation could lead to consideration of relocation in the future. This study provides a case of disaster risk reduction in a remote place with unique place-specific characteristics (e.g., particular forms of subsistence, corporate monopolies, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and social organizations), but also shaped by significant external influences, accompanied by a changing landscape of risk from the slow and rapid onset of environmental changes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
