Community and Citizen Science in the Far North Abstracts

To address climate change’s impact on the environment-health nexus, community collective action groups have emerged in Sitka, Alaska that focus on changing food systems, conservation, and disaster risk reduction. These groups fill gaps where formal institutions, such as governments and businesses, provide inadequate action. These community-based organizations, often non-profit and informal in nature, face classic collective action issues, such as inadequate funding, mobilization challenges, and relying on incentivizing members to participate. This research aims to understand how volunteer-based, local groups self-organize to address climate change and its environmental and health impacts, through local natural resource-based collective action. The methods utilized are semi-structured interviews with members and representatives of community-based environmental groups in Sitka, Alaska, to analyze the group’s activities, operations, challenges, and successes. The ongoing results show that groups are particularly successful in filling gaps in the provision of food, the conservation of certain species, and monitoring local environmental changes. Local interests and disinterests in natural resources, health, and climate change emerge, which create both opportunities and challenges for the groups’ successes. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged community engagement efforts as it has exacerbated existing divisions in the community.

Since 2006, the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA) has partnered with Indigenous organizations and researchers to facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of Indigenous Knowledge and community-based observations. This presentation offers an overview of the elements of a community data management system and outlines considerations for community science and observing programs as they work to safeguard and share valuable data from the inception through the implementation and data dissemination phases of a project. We examine decision points around data management and infrastructure development and share considerations that can help community science programs identify options to safeguard and share data in support of a variety of goals and uses.

The Alutiiq Pride Marine Institute, APMI, in Seward, Alaska, began a monitoring project for seawater carbonate chemistry profiling in the coastal villages that we serve. The Ocean Acidification Research laboratory at APMI analyzes discreet ocean seawater samples from locales around the state to obtain baseline data to assess possible community vulnerability to changing ocean chemistry. In order to attain a data set that temporally represents a locale over time, with robust data, a weekly sampling protocol was adopted. The weekly sampling, ideally on the same day and time, performed by a citizen sampler or the village environmental coordinator, has proven to be an achievable model that can capture statistically meaningful trends over time and provide needed data to inform management and local community resilience planning efforts. Our program has been expanding this baseline monitoring and now includes sites from around the state including Kotzebue, Nome, and Utqiaġvik. This presentation will cover the basic monitoring protocols and how they were developed, outreach to the villages, village participation, and results obtained for the three sites in the Arctic region.

Local experts and scientists are eager to grow their understanding of the rapidly changing Arctic. Since January 2020, we have been working with fishers in Uummannaq (West Greenland) to integrate autonomous temperature-depth sensors in the fishing gears so that fishers can measure temperature profiles whenever and wherever they fish, without additional workload, through the following workflow:

1. The sensor is part of the long line, reaching the bottom like any hook.
2. Once the sensor is out of the water, data is automatically offloaded by a solar powered deck unit.
3. Once the deck unit receives cellular signal, the data is sent over the internet to the Uummannaq Polar Institute server.
4. Upon reception, a visual dashboard is generated and emailed back to all fishers and scientists involved.
5. Periodic focus groups bring together selected scientists and fishers to share their respective observations.

This is an easily replicable concept, embedded in fishers' traditional practices and inclusive of their knowledge, that provides affordable, fully automated and regular (up to daily) temperature profiles in areas that are only rarely reached by scientific missions (typically yearly). It has already proven to be a great catalyst for fishers-scientists conversations and knowledge co-production.

With a relatively sparse network of real-time automated and manual precipitation observations, the complex terrain of Alaska is the current focus of the volunteer Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow network, an expanding program which originated in the Rocky Mountains more than 20 years ago. The widely ranging benefactors of these observations in Alaska include:

1. Weather forecasters
2. Climate scientists
3. Emergency Managers
4. Remote communities
5. Interested residents
6. Drought and fire weather monitoring

The purpose of CoCoRaHS is to enhance surface precipitation observations in order to help out these communities. Automated observations are expensive to install, maintain, and operate. Each volunteer CoCoRaHS measurement (utilizing a simple plastic rain gauge, along with a snowboard during the cold season) contributes to a greater understanding of rainfall and snowfall across Alaska. Precipitation observations are particularly important in Alaska because numerical atmospheric models, and thus also the forecast process, have difficulties resolving moisture and wind fields in the complex terrain and adjacent coastal waters. Currently, only about 20–25 active daily observers (see fig. attached) exist in Alaska’s CoCoRaHS network (typical daily numbers exceed 10,000 observations over the lower-48). This presentation will introduce this citizen science effort, and discuss efforts in expanding its participation in Alaska.

Indigenous methodologies are alternative reflections on research. They aim at assuring research performance in a way that is favorable, respectful, and ethically accurate from an Indigenous perspective (Louis, 2007). According to one of the definitions "Indigenous methodology is a body of Indigenous and theoretical approaches and methods, rules and postulates employed by Indigenous research in the study of Indigenous peoples. The main aim of Indigenous methodologies is to ensure that research on Indigenous issues can be carried out in a more respectful, ethical, correct, sympathetic, useful, and beneficial fashion, seen from the point of view of Indigenous peoples" (Porsanger, 2004). Thus, an Indigenous approach to a research significantly varies from the one of non-Indigenous. Louis (2007) distinguished four differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous methodologies:

1. Acceptance of Indigenous knowledge system (IKS). IKS sometimes enormously differs from scientific knowledge in many ways with respect to context, roots, rhetoric, metaphysics, narratives, and spirituality.
2. Acknowledgement of Indigenous people as collaborators rather than "subjects" or informants, which is quite common in non-Indigenous research.
3. Designation of a research agenda based on a real (and honest) interest rather than funding possibilities.
4. Sharing knowledge of the (past) research with involved Indigenous people.

This presentation focuses on how one person (the author, Dennis Davis) has learned to utilized drone technology to help serve community needs in Shishmaref for many years. Mr. Davis has spent many years utilizing professional drones in multiple ways, such as: (1) to monitor ecological changes in Shishmaref including coastal and bank erosion and sea ice change; (2) to monitor the conditions of sea ice during the winter and spring during sea mammal hunts; and (3) to help respond to emergency situations that the community experiences, such as search and rescue operations for stranded hunters. This utilization of technology to serve the community is crucial in Shishmaref due to two main reasons: (1) Shishmaref faces expedited erosion of the barrier reef island it sits on, and monitoring of this erosion is extremely important; (2) the community of Shishmaref depends heavily on the large marine mammal hunts which force them to send boats out in variable conditions due to climate changes, which require close attention to sea ice conditions, open water, and leads.

The Indigenous Sentinels Network (ISN) was developed by the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island (ACSPI) to support tribally-led data and knowledge collection on environmental conditions and priority species harvested for traditional uses. ISN includes a suite of data collection apps, an online protected database (to ensure data sovereignty), training and technical support, rigorous protocols for data collection, standardized quality control measures, and connection to a vast peer network. The Northern Latitudes Partnerships is working with ASCPI, Alaska Pacific University and several partners to expand the ISN program to five Tribal Conservation Districts (TCDs) across Alaska to support community-led stewardship of traditional foods. TCDs are Tribal entities funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service to promote sustainable use of natural resources for subsistence, economic opportunity, resource development, and cultural preservation. For this project, funds are being used to hire community members to lead local efforts as well as providing training, supplies, and travel for each TCD’s high-priority science and stewardship needs. Some example efforts made possible by this collaboration include monitoring and restoration work for anadromous species like salmon and whitefish and new capacity to support Tribally-led management of moose in Interior Alaska.

Alaska Pacific University outdoor studies Professor, Michael Kaplan, will share stories and lessons from his experiences teaching traditional kayaking at Indigenous spirit camps, with a focus upon innovations in design, materials, and inclusive instruction.

The Anchorage Museum started a soundscape project in 2018 with the goal of connecting K–12 schools and communities to Alaska’s unique soundscapes. The state of Alaska spans thousands of miles and encompasses a diversity of environments and communities, which provides a variety of unique soundscapes to capture and examine to better understand our place. At the start of this project, the Anchorage Museum developed partnerships with five schools throughout the state to collect and examine sound data from their local soundscape. The information collected started the Anchorage Museum’s own sound collection, helped foster collaborations with soundscape ecologists, and served as the content for the development of public and school-based programming. The Anchorage Museum is expanding the scope of this work to a museum exhibit, the creation of a website to allow for public access to the sound collection, the development of a citizen science component, as well as the expansion of community partnerships throughout Alaska to continue the collection of sound data. This project has helped expand how the museum connects to the diverse communities throughout Alaska; as well as create a platform to support conversations around the health of our environment and how it is changing over time.

Ocean warming, reduced sea-ice duration, increased shipping activity, and increased artificial substrate availability are a recipe for introducing a cocktail of marine non-native species (mNNS) to the US. Arctic. Because of the remoteness of the Arctic Ocean, monitoring for mNNS has not been a primary focus, but the risk of introductions is increasing. To guide current and future development activities withing the US Arctic, we (the Smithsonian along with collaborators) are developing a standardized monitoring plan for mNNS. Citizen scientists will be essential to both detection of and response to introduced mNNS. The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center currently monitors for mNNS throughout south and southeast Alaska with the assistance of a network of citizen scientist monitors in a program called Platewatch. We are actively seeking to expand this network into the Arctic. Because of the environmental challenges present, we are also investigating alternative monitoring methods that citizen scientists could implement. In the event of detection of a non-native species, the success of any rapid response plan will also depend on local community involvement, and we hope to start a discussion of what that might include.

A warming Arctic is benefitting the northern expansion of agriculture while also driving the rapid degradation of near-surface permafrost that impact ecosystems, communities, economies, and industry sectors. Understanding the interactions between permafrost and cultivation practices within this permafrost-agroecosystem has received little attention to date. We present an overview of the recently awarded project, “Permafrost Grown: Cultivating convergence between farmers and researchers to foster sustainability for intensifying permafrost-agroecosystems,” funded by the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic program. Our transdisciplinary research team is co-producing knowledge with farmers in the permafrost region of Alaska and Russia to address the following objectives: (1) understanding the interactions and feedbacks within permafrost-agroecosystems, (2) investigating the legacy impacts of permafrost-agroecosystems over the last 100 to 300 years, (3) evaluating the socio-economic trade-offs of the intensification of permafrost-agroecosystems and providing decision-making tools for farmers, and (4) engaging farmer and public participation through outreach activities to advance knowledge and provide opportunities to improve northern food security. This project will facilitate knowledge exchange about permafrost mitigation options with farmers in Yakutia, use field data collection, cultivar trials, existing agriculture experience, remote sensing techniques, economic risk modelling, interviews, and workshops with farmers in the Tanana Valley, Bethel, and Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska.

In 2019, Sunniva Sorby and Hilde Falun Strom left a familiar world and their full-time jobs to start their project called Hearts in the Ice. A nine month expedition turned into 18 months as they served as citizen scientists collecting data and observations for seven international research entities. Via satellite they connected with over 100,000 youth from around the world as they built powerful narratives and stories around what they were doing and how it related to climate change in Svalbard and globally. In 2022, they plan a similar expedition to the Canadian Arctic for eight months where they hope to add value to current research projects and weave in the voices of the Indigenous already on the front line of change. In this presentation they will share highlights of what they have done, how they have cross collaborated, and how citizen science is one powerful way to move us all into action as we face the pressing climate crisis

This presentation summarizes the findings and utility of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS, aka drones) operated by citizen scientists in Arctic applications. Based on two expeditions to both polar regions and the ground-breaking work of the Hearts In the Ice team, a rich data set of images captured by drones has now been acquired and partially processed. RPAS operations in Arctic regions are challenging for several reasons including extreme low temperatures, high winds, freezing conditions, effects of magnetic declination on compass equipment, relatively low GNSS satellite availability, complete darkness during winter months and lack of support facilities (Ader and Axelsson, 2017). Potential advantages of employing drones in these environments include rapid data gathering over small to medium sized areas, high spatial, spectral temporal and radiometric resolution of the data, versatility of the data products, and wide range of potential sensors. Data were collected during a ten-day expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula in March 2018, a four-day expedition to Svalbard in September 2019, and over nearly 20 months between September 2019 and April 2021 in Svalbard by two citizen scientists. Preliminary results are presented and indicate that drone technology can be a valuable geospatial data collection tool in certain applications related to climate change, wildlife monitoring, land use/cover and topographic mapping and reconnaissance.

Although Alaska is home to several hard tick species, it has historically been outside of the range of the most common medically important ticks in the contiguous U.S. To develop a cost-effective and sustainable method for ongoing tick collection across this large geographic area, we developed a community-based passive tick surveillance program. The Alaska Submit-A-Tick Program is a collaboration between university and state veterinary and wildlife agencies and involves direct coordination with veterinarians, wildlife biologists, and the public. After three years, we reflected on the partnerships, funding, outreach strategies, and data sharing technology that we utilized during the program development to assess components that contributed to program success. We also identified gaps and areas for improvement. Overall, the program has provided a large (relative to what we could collect through fieldwork), spatially distributed dataset to guide future research that would not have been feasible without citizen science. Despite the limitations of a dataset collected through convenience sampling, community-based monitoring has been a useful approach for assessing the geographic distribution of ticks in Alaska. Continued monitoring will allow a more accurate assessment of the changing risk of ticks and tick-borne diseases in the state; however, the participation of state agencies and volunteer efforts from academic partners are required for long-term success.

Insect pollinators play a key role in Arctic ecosystem function by directly and indirectly affecting wildlife and their habitat. Many plants in Alaska, including those used for subsistence purposes, are reliant on pollinators for fruit and seed production. However, we are missing critical information about pollinators in Alaska, such as distribution, status, trends, and floral and habitat associations. These data gaps can limit habitat management, species conservation, and status assessments for species proposed for listing under the US Endangered Species Act. Our solution is to fill data gaps is the Alaska Bee Atlas, a statewide collaborative plan and protocol for sampling bees and associated habitat data. In 2021, the Alaska Bee Atlas expanded to community scientists to collect broader data, provide opportunities to educate the public about the importance of pollinators, and engage the public in meaningful science. Informed by lessons learned from the first year of community science, the production of an Alaska Bee Atlas: Community Science Plan is nearly complete. This plan will guide the expansion of community science into 2022 and beyond. This presentation will share lessons learned from this project and how we use community science to fill data gaps and inform management decisions.

Coordinated community-based observing efforts, such as the Alaska Arctic Observatory & Knowledge Hub (AAOKH; https://arctic-aok.org/), can provide sustained long-term observations of shifting environmental conditions in coastal Arctic Alaska. AAOKH is an observing network across six coastal communities, with the primary goal to provide northern Alaska coastal communities with the tools, resources, and scientific support to share their expertise and Indigenous Knowledge through observations of changing coastal conditions and associated impacts to their access to traditional marine resources. AAOKH focuses on tracking environmental observations, creating research partnerships, and building educational opportunities for Indigenous scholars. Coordinated observations from Indigenous local observers collectively provide a broad-scale and synoptic view of changing coastal sea ice and ocean conditions, and ultimately impacts at the community scale. In this presentation, we share recent themes in AAOKH observations, new insights from scientific data collected by AAOKH observers, and advances in our ability to engage Indigenous scholars in the analysis and application of community-based observations. Local observers have documented abrupt changes in sea ice, ocean and air temperatures, and associated weather patterns. Environmental changes were often linked to food security and impacts to traditional lifestyles, such as the safety of travel and shoreline erosion threatening infrastructure.

Arctic Indigenous communities, including those in Alaska who have monitored their lands for ages, increasingly express interest in monitoring through a western science approach due to rapid environmental changes. To address these challenges, the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program coupled with Indigenous Knowledge is providing a space to access other tools. Historically, GLOBE has served as a citizen science program in the Circumpolar North and the world since the mid 1990s, with a focus on K-12 students STEM learning and data contributions to science investigations. However the Alaska GLOBE program has expanded into community science through the ongoing Arctic and Earth STEM Integration of GLOBE and NASA (AE SIGNs) program that has partnered with the Association of Interior Native Educators. Through this partnership, a culturally responsive learning approach and framework has been developed with Native Elder and/or other local expert observations and knowledge as foundation to help guide student investigations and stewardship projects relevant to their communities. AE SIGNs is serving other adults in addition to K-12 educators, in undergraduate classrooms, and in rural communities for learning and helping address issues related to climate e.g., monitoring impacts of or making adaptation plans to climate change.