Climate Change

A recent study indicates fires in the Yukon Flat region of Alaska are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought.

The study by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists overturns old assumptions and paints a troubling portrait of future climate change.

When you set out to model an ecosystem, it’s important to have data, a lot of data. That’s why UAF researchers Dave McGuire and Helene Genet were excited about a study in the Yukon Flats looking at charcoal deposits in lakebed sediments. It gave them 1,200 years’ worth of data.

Genet, McGuire and their colleagues wanted to model fire regimes in the region and how they affected the carbon cycle. The sediment data, McGuire says, were revealing.

“Fire frequency has been greater in the last few decades than it’s been over the last 1,200 years. That suggest things are changing quite dramatically now.”

Carbon is a key ingredient in global climate change. In nature, plants take up carbon dioxide and store it. Some of it is respired back to the atmosphere, but much of finds its way into soils.

In the Arctic and subarctic, that carbon is often locked up for longer periods because of permafrost.

Fires moving across the landscape can release a lot of carbon. And researchers assumed released carbon spurred more plant growth, balancing the books. That assumption might be revised now.

By modeling the effect of long-term fire history on the ecosystem, Genet says it looks like more carbon is being released than captured.

“The way we have spun up the model before leads to an underestimation of the carbon loss in Interior Alaska or at least in regions that are exposed to fire regimes.”

Genet and McGuire’s study just looks at the Yukon Flats. But if the same conditions occur in similar Arctic and sub-Arctic boreal forests, where roughly a third of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon is stored, the implications to climate change could be dire.

We’ve heard a lot about the negative effects of climate change in the arctic and subarctic. But some Alaskans, like farmer Tim Meyers, are seeing warming temperatures as an opportunity.

Now that potato harvest is underway at his Bethel farm, Meyers uses a giant potato washer, like a washing machine for root vegetables, to clean California white potatoes.

They’re some of the only commercially-produced vegetables in this southwestern Alaska region, about the size of Oregon.

Meyers says the warming summers are a big part of his success.

“I hate to say that but I guess I’m taking advantage of the fact that it is getting warmer,” he says.

He says working the tundra — plowing swampy bogs full of silty soil — is tough. But he’s adapted to farming in the sub-arctic, even making his own homemade, fermented fish fertilizer.

At the 15-acre organic farm, which has been operating for more than a decade, Meyers is growing crops like strawberries in greenhouses. But he says as temperatures warm due to climate change, it’s easier to grow things like potatoes, cabbages and kale right in the ground, outside.

“Years ago, it was hard freeze and below zero up to the third week in May,” he says. “We haven’t had any of that this winter.”

In fact, 2014 ranked as the warmest year on record in Alaska. Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the National Weather Service, says that’s not just a fluke, it’s a trend.

“What the last century of weather observations and climate observations in Alaska are telling us is that over the last couple of decades it’s been significantly warmer over most of Alaska than it was during the middle and later part of the 20th Century,” Thoman says.

He says the long-term average temperature for Bethel for an entire year had been 29 degrees, but in 2014 it was nearly 35 degrees. That’s only six degrees difference, but it’s significant because now it’s right above freezing, which allows more things to grow outside.

Most food is flown into in this town of about 6,000, and it can be expensive. At the grocery store here, a bag of russet potatoes can cost twice as much as outside Alaska.

Food security is real issue here. The region has traditionally relied on subsistence hunting and gathering. But residents are becoming increasingly dependent on expensive imports.

“So that’s gonna be kinda cost prohibitive for people with lower incomes to get good nutrition,” says medical resident Peter Abraham.

Abraham works at the local hospital and specializes in nutrition. He also spends time volunteering at Meyers Farm and says it eliminates the biggest barrier to getting fresh produce onto local dinner tables: transport.

“Things that are shipped from far away are not gonna be fresh when they arrive,” he says.

So he hopes cheaper and fresher produce will be more attractive to residents.

At the Meyers Farm stand, customer and long-time resident Josh Craven, is happy with both the price and the quality.

“It seems like we walk out with more for less, and it’s usually better, it’s fresher” Craven says.

He likes to bring his two young daughters shopping with him, so they can understand where their food comes from.

And farmer Tim Meyers is glad that at least some of the food in Bethel doesn’t have to be flown in from Mexico or elsewhere.

“In my mind, there’s no end to the potential,” he says. “I mean it’s obvious we can grow a tremendous amount of food.”

Meyers says he grew about 100,000 pounds of produce this year. Next year he hopes to double that.

Copyright 2015 KYUK-AM. To see more, visit http://kyuk.org/category/radio/.

Using traditional knowledge to support ecological research was the focus of two presentations Saturday at the “Sharing Our Knowledge” Tlingit clan conference.

Behavioral ecologist Fred Sharpe, Ph.D., of the Alaska Whale Foundation, explained to attendees how researchers were using Tlingit place names to help better understand the historical ecology of Southeast.

Sharpe is most concerned about the eastern North Pacific right whale, a highly endangered species with an estimated population of about 30. He said the names of traditional sites or clan houses can indicate that a particular species once populated the area; that’s information that could help researchers understand why a species is in decline.

“Place names can be very instructive,” Sharpe said. “We learned that there’s a place on Chichagof island called Sea Otter Point. And that’s super cool because sea otters aren’t there (now) but it does suggest that they were there in the not-too-distant past.”

Sharpe said Tlingit traditional knowledge has influenced how he thinks about whales.

“I think that gaining some insight into the Tlingits’ perspective has really helped me see how a people can live for centuries, millennia, perhaps even longer with these animals and appreciate them in a nonconsumptive context,” he said. “We see that they loved them and were very proud of them. We take incredible inspiration from that to see how you can intelligently manage species.”

Using Tlingit perspective and knowledge as a guide, Sharpe said he hopes to find ways to return to a more equitable relationship with Southeast’s whales.

Another presenter, Allyson Olds, focused her master’s thesis on hooligan run times in the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers. The main goal of her research was to establish a baseline for the annual arrival of the fish. Aside from other forms of research, Olds interviewed 20 people in the area to understand how the population has changed.

Little research has been done on the fish, which are not currently harvested commercially.

Hooligan is a subsistence food source in Southeast and parts of Southcentral. The small, oily fish usually arrive in Alaska streams and rivers in early summer to spawn, making them one of the first fish available for harvest by subsistence users and wildlife.

Understanding how climate change may impact run times could be key to sustainable management of the fishery, Olds said.

“There’s big implications on the influence of climate change, which not only affects run timing of course,” Olds said. “It affects everything else since so many wildlife predators rely on these. … They’re not just there, they migrate and they show up for these runs. If that run timing is changing, it can also affect their migrations as well.”

Olds said there is some concern that hooligan population decline is making its way north. On the Pacific coast, the once-prolific forage fish was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2010. The following year, British Columbia listed the fish as endangered. Earlier this year, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game closed the Ketchikan area fishery.

Ideally, Olds said, her research would be replicated in other spawning areas to help paint a more accurate picture of the health of the hooligan populations.

Experts believe water scarcity will become a significant issue across most of the world over the next decade. In Southeast Alaska, it’s a different story.

The volume of water flowing through Juneau’s Lemon Creek at one point Thursday was equal to the volume of water flowing through the coveted Rio Grande in the Southwestern United States, according to Brett Walton, a reporter with the online publication Circle of Blue.

While millions of people are dependent on the Rio Grande as a water source, Lemon Creek doesn’t bear the same burden.

One Alaskan community’s glacial creek is a dry region’s grand river.

“The flow of Lemon Creek yesterday in the afternoon was the same as the flow of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and the Rio Grande in Texas and Big Bend,” Walton said. “So the Rio Grande, one of these major iconic Western rivers, these are rivers that are large in history, large in our imaginations but are not big rivers. So a creek here flowing in Juneau is the same size as John Wayne, Rio Bravo — that’s the river’s name in Mexico — that is the size of what we’re talking about with Lemon Creek here.”

And every last drop of water in the Rio Grande is allocated amongst governments, farmers and villages.

The river starts in southcentral Colorado in the Rocky Mountains, flows through New Mexico and then serves as the border between Texas and Mexico before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.

“So a lot of the water, almost all of the water, is diverted for agriculture or municipal uses by the time it reaches El Paso, which is in the very western part of Texas,” Walton said. “So downstream of El Paso the Rio Grande is essentially dry most of the time.”

The volumes of water were reported by the U.S. Geological Survey, where gauges document flow volumes in one location, but vary daily due to changing water flow.

Walton spoke at The Politics of Water last week, a three-day forum hosted by the Juneau World Affairs Council and the University of Alaska Southeast.

During the three-day meeting of the international Arctic Council that wrapped last week in Anchorage, officials made the most headway on an effort to mitigate the impacts of black carbon and methane in the Arctic. State Department deputy secretary David Balton chairs the Council’s most senior officials.

“These short-lived pollutants — black carbon and methane — cause particular climate-related problems in the Arctic,” he said.

Black carbon is particulate waste from fossil fuel combustion. Unsurprisingly, it’s black. So when it lands on snow and ice, it has a warming effect.

Surprisingly, the council’s observer states showed a strong interest in the problem — more than half submitted assessment reports of their own emissions. These are nations who do not border the Arctic, but the week’s meeting made it clear that some certainly want a stronger voice on the council.

“We did something, I believe, that has never been attempted in the history of the Arctic Council,” Balton said. “We spent a half-day with the observers at the table, hearing from them. A lot of them have been wanting to have greater engagement, greater input.”

The topics they were most interested in, Balton said, were the black carbon initiative and migratory bird fly-ways.

And speaking of bigger voices on the Council, where does Alaska fit in?

There are four voices on the Council that represent indigenous peoples of Alaska. But most of the delegates representing U.S. interests are on State Department payroll in Washington, D.C.

“The federal government recognizes that we are an Arctic nation because of Alaska,” Balton said. “And we wanted to be in partnership with the state and the people of Alaska in carrying out our chairmanship.”

Before the U.S. assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council in April, David Balton and colleagues made several trips to Alaska — sort of like scouting trips — to hear from Alaskans on what interests they had for chairmanship.

The three key objectives the U.S. decided to focus on during its Council chairmanship are improving the well-being of Arctic communities, bolstering marine stewardship in the Arctic Ocean, and addressing the impacts of climate change.

That’s a tall order.

“Everything still needs to be worked on,” Balton said. “This is a two-year process. We’re still in the early stages of it.”

Other notable outcomes of the meeting were:

• An Arctic Council working group published the first set of guidelines for unmanned aircraft use in scientific research over the Arctic Ocean.
• Two new task forces are tackling telecommunications development and marine cooperation in the Arctic.
• The U.S., on behalf of the Arctic, will submit the joint statement signed at the GLACIER conference to the Paris climate talks later in the year.

The council reconvenes in six months in Fairbanks.

There are three primary water concerns facing the state: persistent organic pollutants in the Arctic region, loss of freshwater due to increased regional temperatures and ocean acidification, according to Jim Ayers, president of conservation consulting firm Alaska Strategies.

Ayers will discuss these issues Saturday afternoon at the end of a three-day dialogue on water politics hosted by the Juneau World Affairs Council. The event is free and open to the public.

Ayers described one way water issues are directly affecting Southeast Alaska’s ecosystem.

“Sockeye salmon really have that deep red color because their primary diet is krill,” Ayers said.

He explained that ocean acidification is altering krill development, affecting everything that eats krill, from salmon to people.

Experts from across the country will speak about pressing water issues from droughts to wetlands. While water is aplenty in Southeast, its politics are a concern for the state.

The forum kicks off at the UAS Egan Lecture Hall at 7 p.m. Thursday and continues through Saturday afternoon in the lecture hall and Egan Library.

(Editor’s note: location has been corrected)