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The Speakers Bureau is a directory of arctic researchers and experts that are available to visit organizations, communities or schools to give presentations. The directory contains names, addresses, science specialties, and presentation experience.
We encourage organizations and communities applying to the Arctic Visiting Speakers Series to use the Speakers Bureau to select a visiting speaker. If a particular subject or speaker is not listed, please contact Judy Fahnestock at avs [at] arcus [dot] org, for suggested speakers.
Ken Tape
About:
Ken Tape is a research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks studying climate warming and landscape changes in the Arctic. Those landscape changes include the expansion of shrubs and the effect on herbivores, fluctuations in the erosion regime, heterogeneity of vegetation change, and the implications of these changes to the broader arctic system.
Ken often uses repeat photography to document expanding shrubs, migrating tree-line, shrinking glaciers, and deteriorating permafrost in the Arctic. He has written for technical and popular journals, including a recent book for the general public called "The Changing Arctic Landscape" (University of Alaska Press), which features a variety of repeat photography from Arctic Alaska. The book content was developed into a special exhibit that debuted at the University of Alaska Museum of the North May 15, 2010 to Jan 15, 2011, and is now commencing a national tour managed by the Burke Museum in Seattle (http://www.burkemuseum.org/booknow/changing_arctic).
Ken enjoys science that is readily interpretable, and the Arctic Visiting Speaker Program is a great opportunity to synthesize and share the remarkable photographic evidence documenting terrestrial changes in the Arctic. The repeated photographs used to assess change have been published widely, and Ken is happy to share the photographs with science and non-science people alike. Repeated photographs can be interpreted by anyone, thus removing the complicated layer of interpretation that is associated with most measurements of terrestrial change.
