About the
Sustainability of Arctic Communities
Project

Forces for Change
Most Important Elements of Community Life
Types of Knowledge
The Models
Contact the Researchers

The Project and its Goals

The project started in September 1995. Primary funding for this project comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The project is also being sponsored by the Canadian Ecological Monitoring & Assessment Program (EMAN) and the U.S. Man and the Biosphere program (MAB).

The goals of this project are to improve the ability of communities and scientists to discuss: (1) how community life may change in the future and, (2) how communities may be able to shape changes to reflect community values.

Our intent is to use both local knowledge and the results of research studies to help explain how the most important elements of community life may change in the next 10 to 40 years. We expect that, through discussions between communities and scientists, both groups will improve their understanding of changing conditions in the north. We hope that the way scientists and communities work together in this project will serve as a model for future studies.

Forces For Change

There are many possible forces for change in the Arctic. This project focuses on four:

1. Climate change
2. Oil development
3. Tourism
4. Level of government spending

We're in the early stages of learning about interdisciplinary work in the Arctic. We're trying to generate the important hypotheses to test. We are exploring the complex relationships between oil development, climate change, tourism, and non-local hunting on the sustainability of Arctic communities.

The results of our work represent our best understanding of these relationships, gained through science and the knowledge held by communities. We hope that these results stimulate productive discussions among people including community residents, scientists, industry executives, government policy makers and resource managers, representatives of interest groups, and the public at large.We are not predicting the future, just generating ideas about what the future might bring.

Most Important Elements Of Community Life

We are working with four communities in this project: Aklavik, Fort McPherson, Old Crow, and Arctic Village.

We have looked to the four participating Arctic communities to define the most important elements of community life:We have used the phrase "elements of sustainability" to refer to these important elements of community life. The word "sustainability" bothers some community people. It suggests to them that we think the status quo is acceptable. They prefer to think in terms of community goals. Keeping this thought in mind, we talked with community residents and read documents prepared by the community. Our four partner communities share five community goals:

1. Use of, and respect for, the land and animals in their homelands.
2. A cash economy that is compatible with, and supports, continued local use of the land and animals.
3. Local control and responsibility for what is done in village homelands and what happens to resources used by the community.
4. Education of younger people in both traditional knowledge and western science, and education of the outside world about community goals and ways of living.
5. A thriving culture that has a clear identity, is based on time on the land and language, which honors and respects elders.

We have come to recognize that we have, at best, only crude measures of local control, education, and culture. We will continue to work toward better measures. In the meantime, our synthesis model will project:

1. Harvests of local resources, focusing on caribou.

2. Income to residents from local and non-local jobs.

3. Migration of residents in and out of the community, and in-migration of non-residents.

Types of Knowledge

The value of this study comes from the transfer of knowledge among scientific disciplines and between scientists and community experts. We are using model development as the primary way to decide what knowledge needs to be transferred.

There are four types of community knowledge of particular importance in this study:

1. Local knowledge about what affects caribou movements, caribou health, and caribou population changes.
1. Local knowledge about hunting patterns in different situations of caribou location, abundance, timing, and condition.
2. Local knowledge about hunting and employment patterns in different situations of job and cash availability.
3. Local knowledge about what causes people to move from, return to, or continue to live in communities.

We are also building on community values expressed as:

1. Community goals (elements of what makes a community sustainable)

2. Community policies shaping forces for change.

We are building on six types of research in this study:

1. Changes in vegetation in response to changes in temperature and precipitation.
1. Changes in caribou populations in response to changes in vegetation type and vegetation quality as forage.
2. Changes in caribou movements and location in response to oil field facilities and oil field activities.
3. Changes in village harvests and harvest activities in response to changing employment opportunities and changing abundance of caribou.
4. Changes in caribou populations in response to human harvests.
5. Changes in migration of residents in and out of their home community in response to changing employment, harvest and education opportunities.

The Models

We are using models to integrate the work of the research team and to foster discussions between community experts and researchers.

Possible Futures Model

We have developed a web-based computer simulation called the Possible Futures Model. The purpose of the Possible Futures Model is to serve as a discussion tool between researchers, community residents, and other people interested in change in the Arctic.

Synthesis Model

We developed the Possible Futures Model from a spreadsheet-based model we refer to as the Synthesis Model. The purpose of the Synthesis Model is to integrate all the many important relationships between climate, oil development, tourism, non-local hunting, vegetation, caribou, caribou availability to communities, jobs, income, education, hunting, and migration to and from the community. The Synthesis Model serves as a discussion tool among researchers and in detailed discussions with community residents.

Vegetation Model

The Synthesis Model in turn includes a more detailed model, the Vegetation Model. This is a transient, nutrient-based model of arctic plant communities. The model simulates High and Low Arctic landscapes under current climate and warming scenarios over 200 years.

Caribou Simulation Model

The Synthesis Model is based on a more detailed Caribou Simulation Model. Outputs from the vegetation model become inputs to the Caribou Simulation Model. One of the tasks of this project was to update a caribou energetics and population model developed over the years as a major research tool by the Institute of Arctic Biology and the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Climatologists predict that summers will become warmer and snowfall will increase in northwestern North America as a result of human-caused increases in greenhouse gases. Research has shown that caribou are harassed by mosquitoes and parasitic flies more during warmer summers. During warm weather the insects are more active and the caribou spend more time standing around and less time feeding.

It is harder for caribou to get at their winter food (mainly lichens) when the snow is deep. In winters with a deep accumulation of snow they need to spend more time pawing the snow to reach the lichens. This uses more energy and takes time away from eating.

These are just two of the ways in which climate affects the caribou in their yearly cycle.

Research has established links between these climate variables and the amount of time cow caribou spend feeding and the energy they use in their various activities. This information about feeding, activities and energy use has then been linked to body condition of the cows and their rates of pregnancy and calf survival.

These links have been put together in the form of the Caribou Simulation Model which can be used to look at how changes in climate conditions could affect the Porcupine Caribou Herd. The model can also be used to look at how changes in harvest could affect the Herd.

Model of Caribou Displacement

As part of our study, we generated hypotheses about relationships between oil development and caribou. We investigated the possible displacement of concentrations of cows and calves during a two week period immediately following calving. We based our analysis of displacement of concentrations of cows and calves during the calving season on changes in cow/calf concentrations over time in the Prudhoe Bay/Kuparuk oil development area. Thus the actual experience of cows and calves in the the Prudhoe Bay/Kuparuk oil development area served as a model for what the experience might be of cows and calves on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Widlife Refuge if oil development were to take place there.

Model of Caribou Behavior

We also examined the possible reduction in energy reserves by cows that could result from increased movement in developed areas. The second analysis is based on research in the Prudhoe Bay/Kuparuk area on how caribou behave when they are around oil development facilities. This research has shown that caribou around development facilities tend to spend less time and tend to run more than caribou not around development facilities. During periods of high insect harassment, caribou also tend to feed less. We used these research results as a model for simulating the effects of a combination of being around development facilities during high insect periods the the weight gain of X-Mozilla-Status: 0009 on the likelihood that cows would have a calf the next year.

Community Model

The Synthesis Model actually contains a set of spreadsheets that detail relationships at the community level. Unlike the caribou model, we did not have a detailed model of community relationships to start with in this project. To our knowledge, this is the first Community Model of relationships between job opportunities, employment, hunting, and migration.