November 2016 Edition | Volume 70, Issue 11
Published since 1946
Taking the Pulse of the Boreal Forest
Swimming up the sweeping, curved path of the Yukon River, salmon undertake a 2,000-mile journey home to spawning streams across Alaska and Canada and ultimately passing through the Yukon capital of Whitehorse. Here, in a place joined by the river but separated by political boundaries, a group of monitoring experts met last month to better integrate our understanding of the region, but only after passing the invisible, plumb-straight line separating Alaska from Canada. More than 30 experts in areas of wildfire, vegetation, permafrost, contaminants, and invasive species are trying to figure out how to collect research and monitoring data that can be used across the vast forests, mountains, and glaciers of the boreal forest in Alaska and Canada, regardless of the jurisdictional boundaries.
?Most agencies tend to think in shorter funding cycles in terms of specific management mandates, questions or a specific piece of geographic regions like a refuge or park,? said Smith. ?Getting people to step back and think on a longer time scale and at a landscape level is different than the typical decision framework that most agencies work in.?
The idea is not to launch a new and expensive monitoring network, but rather to find what commonalities exist in current monitoring programs or what small tweaks would allow for data to scale and be meaningful to other researchers in a landscape setting. The workshop focused on finding the metrics that best capture change and determine what minimum standards for collecting data would make the data usable. At a time when several agencies are willing to look at their monitoring plans, the focus is on making existing data usable to track changes across the boreal. But to know what to do, we have to know where and how the landscape is changing due to climate change, new development, and changing land use patterns.
NWB LCC Coordinator Amanda Robertson said that is the charge before the partners in Alaska and Canada. ?We have to monitor to know which trajectory we are going towards because we have to make appropriate management decisions based on the trajectories. We need a change detection system, a way to have a finger on the pulse of the landscape,? she said.