Background Articles

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

The Copper River Basin in Alaska has experienced less reliable snow and ice conditions in recent years, impacting winter activities such as trapping, hunting, and gathering firewood. This study, based on nine oral interviews with local residents, reveals that crossing rivers has become more treacherous and difficult, with significant changes in ice conditions observed since the 1970s. Decreased snowpacks and increased shrub growth have also posed obstacles for accessing winter trails, requiring individuals to cut through forests. These changes, combined with socio-economic and technological factors, have affected the way people engage in winter activities in the Copper River Basin. Overall, this research contributes to the understanding of climate change's impact on winter activities in Alaska and the Circumpolar North.

Engineers struggled to keep snow geese away from Montana’s deadly Superfund site, but ecologists have a new plan.

Wednesday was the annual test of Alaska’s tsunami warning system — but Homer, Kenai, Ketchikan, Kodiak, Sitka and Unalaska didn't hear it at all.

About 800 people have had to leave their homes due to the risk of avalanches in East Iceland.

The region of Catalonia, northeastern Spain, is in its worst drought since measurements began. The sheep reservoir supplies water to the city of Barcelona.

Five Central Asian countries have jointly confirmed their interest to mitigate the risk of zoonosis emergence in the region by enhancing overall landscape resilience through the One Health approach.

The 'phantom' Tulare Lake once the biggest lake west of the Mississippi and drained for agriculture purposes is slowly reemerging.

The government of Nunavut has once again flipped its position on resource development on caribou calving grounds, now supporting a "prohibition of development within calving grounds and key access corridors, with seasonal restrictions on activities in post-calving grounds."

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

The ice outside of Kotzebue in the sound and further out into the Bering Sea is more like May Ice then March ice.

Only certain Alaska Native people can hunt sea otters. But as otter populations have grown, so have calls to loosen federal laws protecting them.

Questions still linger about what caused the bear to kill a woman and her baby — but more important for Wales is the question of how to move on.

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

Take a typical Alaska cruise and see the damage in its wake. Waste-water disposal to on board garbage piles up leaking into the natural environment and local waste sites. Noise pollution from the ships impact whales and other species that rely on sounds for communication. Total visitors from the industry impact on small communities has pros and cons. The evidence is clear: the industry needs an overhaul.

World leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to the United Nations report.

Some of the world's leading makers of flu vaccines say they could make hundreds of millions of bird flu shots for humans within months if a new strain of avian influenza ever jumps across the species divide.

Trapped in all that permafrost is an estimated 30 billion tons of carbon. It’s an unfathomable amount, Kirkwood says. With global warming, the permafrost is thawing, threatening to release a “carbon bomb” of heat-trapping methane gas into the atmosphere. But there’s something else lurking in the permafrost that has the potential to be more immediately dangerous to the people and wildlife living in the area: mercury.

A loose raft of brown seaweed spanning about twice the width of the U.S. is inching across the Caribbean. Among annual Sargassum censuses in the Atlantic Ocean, “2018 was the record year, and we’ve had several big years since,” says Brian Lapointe, an oceanographer at Florida Atlantic University, who has studied seaweed for decades. “This is the new normal, and we’re going to have to adapt to it.”

The lawmakers discussed the challenges faced by Alaska’s fishermen in a remote address to Kodiak’s annual commercial fishing trade show.