Background Articles

Brown bears on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are switching to a vegetarian diet of elderberries in preference to salmon because the warmer temperatures are ripening the fruit earlier in the year. Normally the bears would eat up to 75 per cent of the salmon that swim up the rivers to spawn up until about late August. And, when this plentiful supply of protein started to dry up, the bears would switch to the elderberries that usually come into fruit in late August or early September.

Chugach State Park hikers survey the damage from hot days in July when the rainforest burned.

Habitat of the endangered Vancouver Island marmot is disappearing as the warming climate allows trees to grow higher up mountainsides, turning alpine meadows into forest. Adam Taylor, executive . . .

How has temperature changed in each country over the last century? This data visualisation shows temperature anomaly – the departure from the long-term average – by country from 1900-2016. Visualisation by Antti Lipponen (@anttilip) of the Finnish Meteorological Institute based on GISTEMP data (CC BY 2.0).

Jim Wilder, the polar bear project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, recently published a paper on how climate change is impacting polar bear behavior. The study is the first of its kind, combining research from the United States, Norway, Canada, Greenland and Russia to look at what motivates polar bears to attack humans.

In August 2017, Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak was awarded funding by USFWS Tribal Wildlife Grant (TWG) Program. The two-year project, titled “Distribution, Movement and Diet of Invasive Crayfish Populations in Buskin River Watershed on Kodiak Island, Alaska” focuses on characterizing the distribution (snorkel/scuba diving surveys), movement (radio tagging) and diet (stable isotope analyses) of the Signal Crayfish population within Buskin Watershed.

On the north bank of the Kuskokwim River, 401 miles from Anchorage, lies the community of Oscarville, Alaska. In December 2014, the Oscarville Traditional Council volunteered the village to serve as the pilot community for the implementation of a holistic approach project, with the goal of creating healthy, thriving and sustainable communities by bringing together important communal pieces, including culture, housing, energy, infrastructure, water/sewer, community health and economic development. Oscarville’s candidacy for the pilot project stemmed from the sanitation, environmental ...

Climate change has warmed the waters east of Tasmania at four times the speed of the global average. But the heatwave of the southern summer of 2015/2016 was something exceptional, damaging fisheries and bringing new species to the island. It's a sign of things to come, say the researchers examining these events.

Serious and unusual outbreaks of illness from eating raw or undercooked walrus to call attention to the risks.

Warm periods are bringing the temperature up by as much as 30 C in the middle of winter

Longer hot, dry spells in the boreal forests that stretch across Alaska and the Northwest Territories create the conditions for wildfires triggered by lightning strikes.

Keeping tabs on capelin — from the shores of the Atlantic ocean to the world wide web.

Greenlanders struggle to get their lives back together and rebuild the small communities hit by the tsunami earlier this month.

An assistant professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks suspects that changes seen in the auklet population on Little Diomede may be related to changes in climate.

In the Bering Sea, near the edge the continental shelf, fishermen are trying to escape a predator that seems to outwit them at every turn, stripping their fishing lines and lurking behind their vessels.

huge tsunami occurred in the Karrat Fjord on the west coast of Greenland, resulting in severe property damage and casualties in the tiny fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq. The seismic energy detected prior to the tsunami was so large it was first thought to have been the result of a magnitude 4.1 earthquake. However, the cause was a massive landslide on a steep slope of the fjord where millions of cubic meters of rock plunged into the water below, 32 kilometers northeast of the village. Forty-five structures, including eleven houses, were washed away or destroyed, and four people were killed.

Since the mid 1990s, the number of black brant (Branta bernicla nigricans; brant) nests on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD), Alaska, USA, the historically predominant breeding area of brant, has declined steadily.

In the Arctic, brown bears (Ursus arctos) are expanding their range northward, in some cases competing with and even mating with polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Beavers (Castor canadensis) have been found as far north as the coast of the Beaufort Sea. The list includes mammals, amphibians, fish and insects.

Since June 7, 2017, elevated North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) mortalities have been documented, primarily in Canada and were declared an Unusual Mortality Event.  In 2017, there was a total of 17 confirmed dead stranded whales (12 in Canada; 5 in the United States) and in 2018, three whales stranded in the United States. In 2019, two whales have stranded in Canada.

The whales seem to have died from starvation and washed up on shore from California to Alaska