Background Articles

All the birds were gone. Now there is full life in the bird cliffs again. The researchers believe they have found the explanation for the mystery.

Researchers will be stepping up their efforts to track chronic wasting disease in Saskatchewan's north.

Scientists say climate change appears to be a factor making Florida and other parts of the U.S. welcoming to non-native mosquitoes.

With ice declining, bowhead whales of the Pacific Arctic choose to stay longer in the waters up north. A change in migration patterns could affect the bowheads' health and safety, as well as the hunters' access to the subsistence resource.

The Institute of Public Health is expanding the area where they recommend that people take the vaccine against the tick borne encephalitis.

A volunteer program in Saanich, B.C., is helping to beat back invasive species on the island.

Highly venomous spiders native to Chile remain a worry for workers at a firm in Sandviken, near Gävle, several years after they were first discovered.

Russian and American scientists have been cut off from collaborating for a year, and Arctic research is suffering.

Researchers at Memorial University, Ocean Networks Canada and the University of Victoria found the urchins, living as deep as 400 metres below, were expanding their populations into shallower water at an average rate of 3.5 metres per year as ocean warming reduces oxygen levels and food sources at lower depths.

Research shows Beavers are relatively new to the Seward Peninsula and push farther north as climate change occurs.

Vancouver Island is known for its predatory wildlife, such as black bears, coastal wolves and cougars. Many towns and villages sit in areas with high populations of predatory wildlife, making interactions with humans often inevitable, unless effective coexistence management is in place.

The Arctic Sounder - Serving the Northwest Arctic and the North Slope

The North Slope offers a marginal place for a moose because far fewer willow shrubs grow there than in the boreal forest. Moose are recent invaders of the North Slope due to climate warming and expanding willow growth.

There are new signs that killer whales, which are swimming farther north and staying for longer periods of the year in Arctic waters, are increasingly preying on Alaska’s bowhead whales. A newly published study found that 2019, an especially warm year in the region, also seems to have been an especially dangerous year for bowheads.

As big fish crop up in unexpected places, experts say that they're relocating to new environments as waters warm.

Beavers were not previously recognized as an Arctic species, and their engineering in the tundra is considered negligible. Recent findings suggest that beavers have moved into Arctic tundra regions and are controlling surface water dynamics, which strongly influence permafrost and landscape stability. Here we use 70 years of satellite images and aerial photography to show the scale and magnitude of northwestward beaver expansion in Alaska, indicated by the construction of over 10,000 beaver ponds in the Arctic tundra. The number of beaver ponds doubled in most areas between ~ 2003 and ~ 2017. Earlier stages of beaver engineering are evident in ~ 1980 imagery, and there is no evidence of beaver engineering in ~ 1952 imagery, consistent with observations from Indigenous communities describing the influx of beavers over the period. Rapidly expanding beaver engineering has created a tundra disturbance regime that appears to be thawing permafrost and exacerbating the effects of climate change.

Restrictions exist for East and West Mackey, Sevena, Union, Derks and Stormy lakes in 2022

The North American beaver has expanded its range in recent years and is now colonising Arctic territory, researchers have found. More than 12,000 beaver ponds have been mapped in western Alaska – double the amount found in the region 20 years ago.

Salmon abundance is down and population distributions have changed, according to NOAA’s 2021 surface trawl survey.

In September 2021, photographer Dmitry Kokh visited Kolyuchin Island and found the strange sight of polar bears that had taken over an abandoned settlement.