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Please join us to learn more about the recently released book, Drivers of Landscape Change in the Northwest Boreal Region. This book, co-authored by 65 experts in Alaska and northwest Canada, addresses what is driving change in our lands, waters, and wildlife, and includes impacts, future projections, information gaps, and implications for management and ways of life for Indigenous and rural communities. Topics include climate change, wildfire, permafrost thaw, land cover change, invasive species, resource extraction, socioeconomic drivers, and practices of co-production of knowledge. Six of the book’s contributors will provide highlights from the book and how this valuable tool can inform your work in land management, resource stewardship, and research.

Speakers

• Amanda Sesser, 21Sustainability
• Torre Jorgenson, Alaska Ecoscience
• Scott Slocombe, Wilfrid Laurier University
• Nancy Fresco, International Arctic Research Center
• Annette Watson, College of Charleston
• Douglas Clark, University of Saskatchewan

Please mark your calendars for the 7th ABoVE Science Team Meeting (ASTM7), to be held virtually May 11th & 13th, 2021. Our notion is for the sessions on Tuesday and Thursday to focus on plans for the field season and airborne remote sensing, presentations from partner organizations, updates from the Working Group leads, and reports from the ongoing Synthesis Activities. There will be parallel sessions on each day to feature research highlights from individual projects. Each day will end with social hours for casual conversations.

Registration and abstract submission will open on 5 April. We especially encourage abstracts from early career researchers.

Abstracts should be submitted no later than 19 April.

The two-hour-long program of the webinar will be opened with an introductory speech by H. E. Hynek Kmoníček, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States of America, explaining the Czech Republic´s application for Observer Status in the Arctic Council.

The historical and scientific part of the webinar will start with Amb. Jaroslav Olša, Jr., historian and writer and Consul General of the Czech Republic in Los Angeles, and Amb. Zdeněk Lyčka, polar explorer, writer and translator from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, introducing their forthcoming exhibition and a book “Czechs and Alaska. From the Heart of Europe to the Northern Edge of America”. Prepared on the occasion of the 230th anniversary since the botanist Thaddäus Haenke became the first person from the historical Czech Lands who set foot on Alaskan soil in Yakutat Bay. Both panelists will present the activities of Czechs in the US state of Alaska and its Aleutian Islands, as well as the connections and observations of the inhabitants of the country in the heart of Europe with respect to this farthest part of the United States.

The working language of the webinar is English.

Registration is required. To receive the link to join, please register by following the link above.

The next once-a-month virtual seminar series on Sea Level, GIA and Ice Sheets will be on the theme of "Perspectives from the modern sea level and ice sheet modeling communities".

Aimée Slangen, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and a lead author of the IPCC AR6 report, will discuss advances in modern sea level research and coastal risk and Fiamma Straneo from SCRIPPS Institution of Oceanography (UCSD) will discuss the ISMIP6 effort and offer her perspective on how to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Seminar attendance is open to all. Please follow the link above to register.

Idowu (Jola) Ajibade, Assistant Professor of Geography, Affiliated Faculty, Black Studies, Portland State University

Dr. Idowu (Jola) Ajibade’s research focuses on how individuals, communities, and cities respond to global climate change and their different capacities for adaptation and transformation. She explores adaptation in the context of resilience planning, eco-industrialization, eco-gentrification, uneven development and managed retreat. Ajibade’s research draws on urban political ecology and environmental justice lenses to interrogate both conventional as well as alternative approaches to adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and sustainability.

AlexAnna Salmon, Igiugig Village Tribal Council President

President AlexAnna Salmon was raised in the village of Igiugig, Alaska, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a dual major in Native American Studies and Anthropology. As the Igiugig Tribal Council president, Salmon works closely with her community, academic interests, and partners throughout the state as she leads local initiatives for renewable energy and sustainability and advocates for revitalization of Yup’ik language and culture. In 2015, Salmon was invited to President Obama’s roundtable discussion with Alaska Native leaders during his state visit.

Mary and Peter R. Dallman 1951 Great Issues Lecture, sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding (Dartmouth). Made possible by a gift from Mary and Peter R. Dallman ’51.

Events are free and open to the public.

How are geopolitics and environmental change experienced on the ground? How can you find out, let alone represent those experiences? Ruth Maclennan will discuss her films and other artworks made in and about the Russian Arctic and how they emerge from her research and a kind of fieldwork involving open questions, formal experimentation, and improvisation. She will show excerpts from her films Cloudberries, Call of North, and Hero City, and also discuss new possibilities and plans for collaborative practice and fieldwork in light of the pandemic and the ecological emergency.

Maclennan filmed Cloudberries (2019) while travelling with an anthropologist, each conducting their own research and exchanging ideas about fieldwork and practice. Cloudberries was filmed on the Kola Peninsula in a small fishing village along the Northern Sea Route during the hottest summer on record. The village has taken on geopolitical significance because it is situated at the nearest point on land from the Shtokman gas field. But lives go on below the radar. The narrator – the filmmaker – is “just visiting” with her camera. She sits chatting in kitchens, meeting villagers and visitors, listening to the sounds of wildlife and the sea, a music festival, and an abandoned schoolhouse full of life.

Cloudberries, Call of North, and Hero City will be available free to view online before the event via a temporary password-protected link to registered participants.

Note: The 3rd Arctic Science Ministerial was originally scheduled for 21-22 November 2020, but was rescheduled to 08-09 May 2021.

In order to engage with Arctic scientists and knowledge holders on multiple levels, the ASM3 organizers plan to engage researchers at the several science meetings throughout 2020. These meetings will give the research community an opportunity to shape and develop the science-to-policy process resulting in the Arctic Science Ministerial Joint Statement to be signed in Tokyo.

Since the last Arctic Science Ministerial in 2018, changes in the Arctic ecosystem and the resulting impacts locally and globally have been severely felt. While the reasons for these changes in climate largely stem from activities outside of the Arctic, the Arctic is warming at a rate of nearly double the global average.

The ASM3 organizers would like to hear directly from the research community about what matters most in international Arctic science collaboration.

Organized in cooperation with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

The Arctic Circle Japan Forum will be organized in association with the Third Arctic Science Ministerial Meeting (ASM3), which will be co-hosted by the Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

ASM3 follows the Second Arctic Science Ministerial Meeting, which was hosted by the Governments of Finland and Germany, and the European Union in 2018, and the White House Arctic Science Ministerial, hosted in Washington, D.C. in 2016.

The Arctic Circle is collaborating with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

Governments, universities, companies, research institutions, organizations, associations and other partners are invited to submit proposals for Sessions to the Arctic Circle Secretariat.

This webinar mini series has been initiated by the SIOS remote sensing service as a response to the new challenges posed by COVID-19 and will take place approximately every month.

Several speakers will present recent observations and opportunities in relation to remote sensing platforms, leaving room for discussion and creating a social experience within the research community.

The aim of this webinar series is to keep you updated, provide a social experience, help to engage the Svalbard research community, and offer you an anchor point to a drifting world!

The next webinar in the SIOS webinar series is going to be about terrestrial research in Svalbard. Join us to learn about current research on terrestrial biology in Svalbard as well as knowledge gaps.

Tentative Programme: (All times in CEST)

• 10:00 - 10:05 Shridhar Jawak (SIOS): Welcome and updates from SIOS-KC
• 10:05 - 10:20 Maren Hansen (UNIS/University of Bergen/SIOS): Spatial ecology of the Svalbard reindeer
• 10:20 - 10:35 Stephen Coulson (UNIS): The invertebrates of Svalbard
• 10:35 - 10:50 Karina Wieczorek (University of Silesia): Feed, breed & die - the amazing life cycle of Svalbard aphids
• 10:50 - 11:05 Maarten Loonen (University of Groningen): Why do barnacle geese migrate to the Arctic to breed?
• 11:05 - 11:20 Peter Convey (British Antarctic Survey): Integrated approaches to understanding Svalbard's terrestrial ecosystems
• 11:20 - 11:30: Open for questions

The purpose of the discussion is to gain a diversity of views from current and retired military officers who have unique insights on the emerging defense and security environment across the Trans-Atlantic Arctic region.

How serious and in what ways is the rising Great Power Competition affecting the stability of Trans-Atlantic Arctic Security? Importantly, amongst the priorities affecting each NATO/NATO Partner's respective national security interests in the Arctic region, how does Arctic defense and security stack against other competing factors, such as commercial developments and associated rising maritime traffic in the high latitudes or the safety of trans-Atlantic shipping as a result of warming/increased melting of the Greenland Ice sheet?

Join the Wilson Center's Polar Institute and the Arctic Domain Awareness Center for a discussion about these questions and trans-Atlantic security in the Arctic.

Speakers

Maj General (ret) Mats Engman
Distinguished Military Fellow, Institute for Security and Development Policy

Rear Admiral (ret.) Lars Saunes
Professor and Distinguished International Fellow, International Programs, U.S. Naval War College

Captain(n) J.F. French, MSM, CD
Deputy Commander Joint Task Force North

Col. Petteri Seppälä
Defense Attaché, Embassy of Finland, Washington D.C

Col. David G. Hanson
Commander of the 821st Air Base Group, Thule Air Base

Moderators

Michael Sfraga
Director, Polar Institute // Director, Global Risk and Resilience Program

Randy Kee
Global Fellow; Major General, USAF (Retired); Executive Director, Arctic Domain Awareness Center, University of Alaska Anchorage