Research Opportunities

Overview
The overarching research theme of the Resilience and Adaptation Program is Global-Local interactions of Social-Ecological Systems of a Rapidly Changing North. Within this theme, RAP provides research opportunities in several interrelated research areas that integrate ecological, economic, and cultural issues. These include:

• Climate-Disturbance-Human Interactions,
• Food Security
• Adaptive Resource Co-Management
• Forestry
• Resilient Indigenous Communities
• Sustainable Fisheries
• Alternative Energy
• Wildlife and Subsistence Resources

These issues represent research strengths at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They are also among the most high-profile policy issues in Alaska. Indeed, state and federal management agencies in Alaska have identified these as the major issues that they have most difficulty addressing. Public debate on these issues has focused on apparent conflicts between ecological, economic, and cultural values. Resolution of any of these issues therefore requires the integration of these concerns. These issues are highly interdependent. For example, fire regime strongly influences forest management and vice versa. In addition, fire is a key management tool used to maximize subsistence resources, and fire control provides wages that enable indigenous villagers to remain in villages and participate in subsistence activities. Alaska provides a natural laboratory in which students can get first-hand experience integrating ecological, economic, and cultural components of an interdisciplinary issue. Although we encourage Resilience and Adaptation Program students to focus their research in one these four areas in Alaska to maximize the integration within the program, we allow students to participate in other interdisciplinary research efforts if this is more appropriate to their PhD programs.
In this section we summarize the major research programs in which Resilience and Adaptation Program faculty are engaged. No single research program provides the full interdisciplinary breadth that we hope will eventually characterize regional research programs. However, the spectrum of research being conducted at UAF provides a wide range of disciplinary perspectives on each of our focal issues. Moreover, all of the Resilience and Adaptation Program faculty involved in this research are committed to the interdisciplinary research perspective of the Resilience and Adaptation Program training program. These research programs thus provide two types of opportunities for Resilience and Adaptation Program students. (1) The students can become engaged in the research to learn disciplinary skills (the internship program). (2) The student can bring an interdisciplinary perspective that would broaden the goals of the currently funded research. For example, a student in economics could study fire effects on ecosystem services in the LTER program, drawing on data and information on ecological processes from the current research and bringing in an economic perspective that would make the LTER research more relevant to society. Examples of current projects are listed below.

• Heterogeneity and Resilience of Human-Rangifer Systems: A Circumpolar Social-Ecological Synthesis is an international project involving 11 researchers from four arctic countries. The study is a retrospective and model-based analysis to understand the relative resilience and adaptability of regional Human-Reindeer/Caribou Systems to forces for global change. The project integrates (1) impacts of global-scale climate patterns on habitat and caribou energy budgets as related to animal reproductive performance, (2) socio-economic processes that affect human use of the resource, and (3) the institutional responsiveness of regional and national decision makers to local interests and knowledge. It provides IGERT students with opportunities for international comparative analyses of social-ecological systems that are culturally and politically distinct, but have evolved in similar biophysical environments and use a similar focal resource (reindeer/caribou). (Kofinas, Griffith, Berman (UAA): NSF and Environment Canada funding)
• IPY: Impacts of High-Latitude Climate Change on Ecosystem Services and Society explores the societal consequences of recent and projected changes in ecosystem services, the benefits that society derives from ecosystems. The research goals are to (1) document the current status and trends in ecosystem services in the Arctic and Boreal Forest, (2) project future trends in these services; and (3) assess the societal consequences of altered ecosystem services. Subsistence-based communities in northern and Interior Alaska are integrally involved in the design, implementation, and use of research to ensure that the research directly meets stakeholder needs. The project collaborates with similar research programs in other arctic nations to provide a pan-arctic synthesis of status and trends in ecosystem services. The research directly addresses a critical missing link in most global-change research—quantitative assessment of the causes, consequences, and likely future trajectories of those ecosystem services that are of greatest concern to society by providing spatially explicit time series of maps of ecosystem services and their likely future trends. (Chapin, Rupp, Kofinas, Hepa; NSF funding)
• Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy is the only NOAA Regional Integrated Science and Assessment (“RISA”) Center in Alaska. This center is examining the impacts of climate change on the health, lives, and livelihoods of Alaskan (including the business sector), with the goal of contributing to decision-making at the national, state, and local levels. Coastal and interior Alaska regions serve as the focus of interdisciplinary research, with active participation by stakeholders. This research center provides an opportunity for IGERT students to develop the practical policy consequences of their social-ecological research. (White, Gerlach, Walsh: NOAA funding.)
  The Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR) addresses individual and community resilience with respect to health issues in rural Alaska, with a focus on dietary issues, cultural traditions, and community well-being of indigenous peoples. The center is developed in partnership with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, and its research links pan-arctic indigenous health problems (e.g., diabetes, obesity) with regional institutions, and local causes and consequences. (Mohatt, Drew, Boyer, others; NIH funding).
• The Human-Fire Interactions Project studies the role of wildfire on the Boreal System and its human residents, particularly as affected by human activities. The research focuses on three feedback loops: (1) fire-climate-vegetation interactions that affect the global climate system; (2) fire-ecosystem-community interactions that influence indigenous communities through human ignitions, fire impacts on subsistence, and fire-fighting wages; and (3) fire policy-community interactions by which public opinion and national policy interact to influence suppression actions near communities. This research explicitly addresses cross-scale interactions that influence social-ecological systems. IPY has approved this project for extension to the pan-arctic scale. (Chapin, McGuire, Rupp, Lovecraft; NSF funding)
  Humans and Hydrology at High Latitudes creates a pan-Arctic model of human water use and how it will be affected by climate change. The project examines the role of water in the lives and livelihoods of Alaska Native Villages on the Seward Peninsula, developing agent-based models to predict the impact of climate change on water resources and the communities that rely on them. (White, Schweitzer; NSF funding)
• The Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, which focuses on the long- and short-term resilience of Alaska’s boreal forest in response to climate change.  This LTER has recently added a new research thrust on human dimensions and ecosystem services that range from global-scale climate feedbacks to local-scale provisioning of subsistence resources (Chapin, Ruess, Kielland, Kofinas, Rupp; NSF funding).