ACCAP Video Podcast

Using a facilitated online dialogue process, Resilience Dialogues enables communities to engage with scientists and resilience practitioners to identify challenges, locate relevant resources, and prioritize achievable action steps towards resilience. A public-private collaboration launched in 2016, the Resilience Dialogues is led by the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP), in close coordination with the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and several other public and private entities. Nearing the end of its third year of implementation, the Resilience Dialogues has supported over 20 US communities on their journey to build community resilience to a changing climate.

The winter of 2017-18 brought record late freeze-up and extremely low sea ice cover to the southern Chukchi and Bering Seas with dramatic impacts to the ecosystem this past summer. Naturally, inquiring minds want a heads-up on the upcoming season. This presentation will review the current and forecast state of the oceans and atmosphere and provide several scenarios for the winter and spring with an emphasis on sea ice. Relevent Links Below WMO Pan-Arctic Climate Winter 2018-19 outlookPan-Arctic climate outlook Press Release LEO Webinar on the Bering Sea cold pool collapse and species changes Webinar of interest:Title: Causes for the record low sea-ice extent in the Bering Sea in 2018Speaker: Phyllis Stabeno Ph.D., Oceanographer, NOAA Research, Seattle, WA.Date & Time:   November 19, 2018 1:00 pm - 2:00 pmETLocation: PMEL, Oceanographer Room (#2104), 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98103Remote Access: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/891851101 North Pacific Fishery Management Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee meeting the week of December 3

PLEASE NOTE UNUSUAL DAY Environmental change and extreme events are an ongoing part of the Alaskan scene, impacting individuals, communities, businesses, tribes and governments on time scales of hours to decades. Impacted areas range from Interior Alaska to coastal and offshore areas. This review will provide updated examples of climate and environmental change in Alaska, results of recent research on the drivers of these changes, and a look ahead at what the best information we have suggests future decades will bring to Alaska.  Available in-person in IARC/Akasofu 407

Alaska experiences extremely variable and increasingly active wildland fire seasons, with 6.6 million acres burned in 2004 and 5.1 million in 2015 respectively. The majority of acres burn in relatively brief periods of extremely warm and dry weather. Our hypothesis is that there are localized weather characteristic and identifiable large-scale weather patterns conducive to such rapid wildfire growth. The likelihood of these patterns can be the target of forecasts over periods of several days to several weeks in order to inform decision-makers and other potentially affected stakeholders. The Hollings Scholars utilized an existing database of daily wildfire acreage back to at least the 1990s. They identified sub-monthly periods of rapid wildfire growth in both boreal and tundra ecosystems and performed analysis of associated atmospheric conditions and synoptic weather patterns using online and UAF available meteorological reanalysis data. This presentation will present the findings of their work.

The University of Alaska Museum Insect Collection is a biorepository for vouchers from varied projects throughout the state. A number of examples of possible and potential climate change impacts on the terrestrial invertebrates of Alaska will be presented. These will cover various taxa including snow-field associated rove beetles, butterflies, ants, and earthworms. This work will be put in a global context. Papers mentioned during presentation: Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas Declining diversity and abundance of High Arctic fly assemblages over two decades of rapid climate warming Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents Compounded effects of climate change and habitat alteration shift patterns of butterfly diversity MORTALITY OF LEPIDOPTERA ALONG ROADWAYS IN CENTRAL ILLINOIS  Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? New Records of Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) From Dogs, Cats, Humans, and Some Wild Vertebrates in Alaska: Invasion Potential. Earthworms (Oligochaeta: Lumbricidae) of Interior Alaska Butterflies of Alaska, A Field Guide Warm summers prepare for spruce bark beetle return Increasing insect reactions in Alaska: Is this related to changing climate?

As forests grow, the trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it within their growing biomass (trunk, branches, leaves and root systems). A “forest carbon offset,” is a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)—the emission of which is avoided or newly stored—that is purchased by greenhouse gas emitters to compensate for emissions occurring elsewhere. Offsets may be developed under voluntary market standards or compliance market standards, each of which has specific carbon accounting and eligibility rules. This presentation will focus on how offset projects work and the different types of forest management activities involved, all with a focus on Alaska. It will also cover specific carbon projects in Alaska and working with land owners (including village corporations) assessing the risks and rewards of such projects and whether or not they want to be involved in a project.   Email Nathan Email Clare CARB forest protocol website and the PDF of the protocol

Climate change data -- and future projections of related impacts -- are crucial to community planners, land managers, and indeed all the people of Alaska. We depend on the landscape and its resources, and that landscape is changing. But raw data, even if freely shared, is only useful to a small percentage of people. Thus, SNAP offers easily accessible online tools to allow everyone to view models and maps showing changes in temperature, precipitation, fire, sea ice, extreme events and other variables at the community or regional level. These tools are always being developed and expanded. Join us to see what's available, and what's new! Check out all the cool tools HERE

Southeast Alaska is part of the the largest temperate rainforest in the world and is dependent on copious amount of precipitation. Like other ecosystems, significantly below normal precipitation effects the entire hydrologic cycle. The impacts of a rainforest drought range from hydro-electric power generation and community water supply to fish migration. This talk will go through the causes, specific impacts and how difficult it is to predict the onset and relief from drought conditions in an rainforest.

Breakup transforms an ice-covered river into an open river. Two ideal forms of breakup bracket the types of breakup that commonly occur. At one extreme is thermal breakup. During an ideal thermal breakup, the river ice cover deteriorates and melts in place, with no increase in flow and little or no ice movement. At the other extreme is the more complex and less understood mechanical breakup, which is the focus of this presentation. The main driver of mechanical breakup is the flow discharge hydrograph. The increase in flow induces stresses in the cover, and the stresses in turn cause cracks and the ultimate fragmentation of the ice cover into pieces that are carried by the channel flow. Ice jams take place at locations where the ice fragments stop; severe and sudden hydraulic transients can result when these ice jams form or when they release. This presentation will focus on mechanical breakup and the historical evolution of our understanding of this topic. The presentation will include discussions of ice cover formation and the typical resulting ice structure, wave-ice interaction, the physics of the cracking, and the current status of our understanding of breakup. CRREL Ice Jam Database Yukon River breakup timelapse video Gallatin River breakup wave

The Arctic is changing at an accelerated rate due to climate change and increased anthropogenic activity. Given the rate of change, never has it been more important to work toward a holistic understanding of the Arctic’s interconnecting systems. A co-production of knowledge framework will provide the holistic view and comprehension needed to inform effective and adaptive policies and practices. We underscore the role and value of different knowledge systems with different methodologies and the need for collaborative approaches in identifying research questions. We will present the most important components that form a co-production of knowledge framework. Contact the speakers Carolina Behe Raychelle Daniel Julie  Raymond-Yakoubian Examples of Co-Produced Knowledge (also check out the word document under the documents heading) Knowledge of Supernatural Environment (Kawerak) Kawerak Social Science Program

Join Molly McCammon, Executive Director of the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS), as she describes the latest partnerships, ocean observing projects and data products and applications produced by AOOS, the Alaska regional component of the national Integrated Ocean Observing System. Begun in 2004, AOOS is now one of the leaders in Alaska facilitating ocean observations, piloting new technologies and making the use of ocean data easier for navigation safety, emergency response, and ecosystem management.

Communities in Alaska’s Arctic and Subarctic regions are at risk from environmental threats including flooding, erosion, and thawing permafrost.  However, the character and relative magnitude of those risks can vary from community to community, and it is not always clear which environmental threats pose the greatest amount of risk.  This presentation describes an ongoing project being conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the USACE Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, and the US Army Corps of Engineers Alaska District.  The project is sponsored by the Denali Commission.  The purpose of the project is to use existing data to better characterize the threats to Alaska’s communities associated with flooding, erosion, and permafrost thaw, and develop a system by which stakeholders can evaluate the combined threat.  The presentation will focus primarily upon consideration of the threats imposed by permafrost thaw, as that is the main focus of the UAF/CRREL component of the project. Take the Community Survey HERE to help develop a list of assets and condition for a baseline in your community! Contact Bill Schnabel HERE

Adapt Alaska is a website developed by a collaborative to create a space for discussion between communities, tribes, agencies, and nonprofits to enable communities to successfully adapt to rapidly changing landscape, ocean, and climate conditions across Alaska. The collaborative emerged out of coastal resilience and adaptation workshop in the Bering Sea Region and Southeast Alaska where over 300 decision makers from 52 Tribes and 16 State and Federal agencies, as well as University researchers and nonprofits, met to discuss the greatest challenges facing communities related to a changing climate. One of the key items identified by participants was a website that would be beneficial in providing communities a synthesis of some of the greatest challenges related to climate change in specific to Alaska, and then provide links to data and tools useful for monitoring, mitigation, and adaptation planning.   The website was released in an initial version 1.0 in November 2017.  Planning is underway for version 2.0, which will provide first person stories about successful adaptation strategies used by communities across Alaska, enabling Alaskans to share their stories of success.  The site will also gain the ability to host documents and data, instead of only linking to documents and data on other websites, and a calendar and quarterly newsletter will be added.  Version 3.0 in the planning stages will have a tool for community adaptation planning.  Adaptation plans are underway in several communities in Alaska.  These plans are expensive, often completed by consultants. This tool will walk communities through the adaptation planning process so they can get started themselves, providing links to data needed for plans, as well as templates used in existing adaptation plans.  While website improvement are ongoing additional coastal resilience workshops are being planned to expand the collaborative, and help collaborative team members learn what additional resources could be useful for communities across Alaska to successfully adapt and build resilience.  Website Available HERE

Changes in climate are disproportionately affecting northern latitudes, and this is altering relationships between human societies and their environments. Rural communities in boreal Alaska rely heavily on natural resources for provisional and cultural purposes, and have reported challenges caused by contemporary environmental changes. Environmental disturbances associated with climate change, such as shifts in fire regime, hydrologic changes affecting waterways, thawing of permafrost, extreme weather events, and unstable snow and ice conditions, have been qualitatively associated with altered accessibility of subsistence resources.  Our research objective was to quantify the impact of disturbances driven by climate change on access to ecosystem services in Interior Alaska.  In collaboration with nine rural boreal Alaska communities, we documented changes observed by subsistence users. Geotagged photos of disturbances that community members encountered while engaged in resource gathering activities were coupled with their interpretation of the impact of the disturbance on their travel, as well as traditional ecological knowledge gathered through comprehensive interviews on the history of environmental disturbances in their subsistence harvest areas.  We identified eight general categories of climatic change influencing access to resources by rural residents: ice conditions, snow conditions, water levels, erosion, sedimentation, vegetative community composition, windy days, and undetermined. We then used frequency and intensity information for the disturbances reported to conduct a vulnerability assessment to identify which disturbances were having the greatest impact on travel. Preliminary analyses indicate that water levels, erosion, snow conditions and ice conditions are the most detrimental to rural residents’ abilities to travel and access subsistence resources across the Interior.  Through combining traditional ecological knowledge and scientific analysis, we characterized the impact of climate change on travel networks used for subsistence resource harvest across the study region and provide information that collaborating communities can use to optimize community resilience and self-reliance. These data can be used by agencies and local communities to foster adaptation to a rapidly changing climate. Contact Helen HERE

The Ecological Atlas of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas takes you on a scientific journey through natural history and ecological relationships in the Arctic marine environment. This comprehensive atlas is organized into six sections: Physical Setting, Biological Setting, Fishes, Birds, Mammals, and Human Uses. Audubon Alaska and their collaborators synthesized data from multiple studies, species, decades, and seas into more than 100 seamless maps. Through publication of the Ecological Atlas, Audubon aims to inform sustainable management of the Arctic’s natural resources and inspire an appreciation for this spectacular place. Check out the Atlas HERE

The Alaska Fire Science Consortium (AFSC) is a boundary organization that works across the science-management interface to enhance the role that scientific information plays in decision-making for fire management in Alaska. We conducted a case study of AFSC to examine how they facilitate the delivery, development, and application of climate and related information and to determine the outcomes of their work. Specifically, this talk will outline the evolution of AFSC to examine how the activities they use to deliver science and facilitate new research development, their engagement with climate science information, and the outcomes of their work change over time.

A primary duty of the US Arctic Research Commission (USARC) is to interact with Arctic residents, international Arctic research programs and organizations, and local institutions including regional governments, in order to obtain the broadest possible view of Arctic research needs. To facilitate this, the USARC coordinates working groups to examine and develop research needs for specific topics—generally based on feedback from stakeholders. USARC’s Anchorage-based office currently coordinates three working groups: the Alaska Rural Water and Sanitation Working Group (ARWSWG), the Arctic Renewable Energy Working Group (AREWG) and the Arctic Mental Health Working Group (AMMHWG). The Alaska Rural Water and Sanitation Working Group’s mission is to maximize the health benefits of in-home running water and sanitation services in rural Alaska. There are a variety of entities in Alaska working towards improving health outcomes in rural Alaska by providing and improving water services in villages. The US Arctic Research Commission (USARC) is coordinating these groups so that this work is maximally efficient and ideas can be shared across federal, state, Alaska Native, and academic groups. Our work is directly applicable to the USARC’s priority goal of Arctic Human Health. The Arctic Renewable Energy Working Group (AREWG) aims to promote research on renewable and efficient energy systems in remote Arctic communities. Integration of renewable resources and supporting technologies into a community’s current power generation capacity has the potential to generate local employment, decrease air pollution and carbon footprint, and ideally reduce consumer costs. Energy efficiency and conservation are critical components of this effort. Finally, the Arctic Mental Health Working Group (AMHWG) aims to work collaboratively with tribes, healthcare providers and other stakeholders to promote research on, and raise awareness of, the significant mental and behavioral health disparities that exist between Arctic and non-Arctic populations. As an initial focus, AMHWG has chosen to address suicide prevention in Arctic communities with a specific emphasis on early intervention approaches for children and youth. It is the USARC’s hope that these working groups will provide pragmatic approaches to improving life in rural Alaska via the use of scientific research, as well as inform the research agenda for each of these topics. This webinar will present an overview of the mission and objectives of the three US Arctic Research Commission working groups, as well as ways to connect with their activities. US Arctic Research Commission website with many useful reports HERE Report mentioned during talk: Residential Heating in Remote Arctic Villages

Communities and governments need reliable information to adapt to rapid changes in the Arctic environment. Scientists need to continually advance the body of knowledge and—at the same time—answer immediately practical questions. The Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) brings together researchers from diverse disciplines and institutions to accelerate cross-discipline syntheses and to make scientific understanding more readily accessible to policy makers and other stakeholders. Knowledge pyramids utilized in the creation of Arctic Answers foster syntheses and broad understanding across sectors and stakeholder groups, including at the policy level. Brendan Kelly, Executive Director of SEARCH, will discuss SEARCH and the Arctic Answers initiative. SEARCH Arctic Answers

Alaska experienced record-setting warmth during the 2015-16 cold season (October-April). Statewide average temperatures exceeded the period-of-record mean by more than 4°C over the seven-month cold season and by more than 6°C over the four-month late-winter period, January-April. The record warmth raises two questions:  (1) Why was Alaska so warm during the 2015-16 cold season?  (2) At what point in the future might this warmth become typical if greenhouse warming continues? On the basis of circulation analogs computed from sea level pressure and upper-air geopotential fields, the atmospheric circulation explains less than half of the anomalous warmth. The warming signal forced by greenhouse gases in climate models accounts for about 1°C of the of the anomalous warmth.  A factor that is consistent with the seasonal and spatial patterns of the warmth is the anomalous surface state. The surface anomalies include (1) above-normal ocean surface temperatures and below-normal sea ice coverage in the surrounding seas from which air advects into Alaska and (2) the deficient snowpack over Alaska itself.  The increase of the “excess warmth” in late winter implicates snow cover and its albedo effect, which is supported by observational measurements in the boreal forest and tundra biomes. Climate model simulations indicate that warmth of this magnitude will become the norm by the 2040s and 2015s if greenhouse gas emissions follow their present scenario. We will show how the more recent “normal” winter of 2016-17 fits supports the conclusions.   Publication in the Journal Climate - The Exceptionally Warm Winter of 2015/16 in Alaska

Speakers:  Randi Jandt, Alaska Fire Science Consortium fire ecologist, UAF Martin Stuefer, Geophysical Institute associate research professor, UAF Stacey Cooper, Environmental Public Health Program health assessor, State of Alaska Department of Health and Social Services This webinar, organized jointly by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium and the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, will focus on changing wildfires in Alaska and resulting smoke impacts to help our audience be prepared for the upcoming wildfire season. Randi Jandt will summarize the evidence for changing wildfire seasons and therefore smoke moving into new areas of the state. Martin Stuefer will share information about the WRF-Chem model for forecasting smoke dispersion, which will be operational for 2017. Stacey Cooper will summarize what is known about health effects of smoke exposure and how communities should respond to smoke events. We will provide a list of resources for follow up.   Useful Links https://fire.ak.blm.gov/ http://fnsb.us/transportation/Pages/Air-Quality.aspx http://akfireconsortium.uaf.edu/ http://smoke.arsc.edu/about.html http://leonetwork.org/en/ http://dec.alaska.gov/air/ http://dhss.alaska.gov/dph/Epi/eph/Pages/wildfire/default.aspx http://dec.alaska.gov/Applications/Air/airtoolsweb/Advisories https://www.airnow.gov/