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By Keith Musselman

The Arctic and rivers located in the Arctic and subarctic are warming due to climate change. To understand the impacts this warming will have on people, partnering with impacted Indigenous communities in the region is important. It is also important that these partnerships are ethical and equitable and produce science that is actionable. A new, open-access paper in the journal Community Science discusses efforts undertaken by the Arctic Rivers Project, funded by the NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic program. The interdisciplinary project team, led by Geography’s Assistant Professor Keith Musselman, aims to conduct ethical and equitable research with Indigenous communities and generate science that is useful to those communities. 

Through this research, their goal is to better understand potential future impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities in central and northern Alaska and the Yukon Territory in Canada. To achieve this goal, the project team formed an Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) and together developed guidelines for how we can work collaboratively with Indigenous communities. The process of forming an IAC and related guidelines is a new way to approach collaborative research when working across a large geographic area. The paper is led by USGS social scientist Nicole Herman-Mercer and co-authored by Indigenous leaders and the interdisciplinary project team. Together, they present their research process so that it may provide an example for other scientific efforts.

Now in its fourth year, the Arctic Rivers Project has provided support and research opportunity for over 10 undergraduate researchers, one Ph.D. student (Dylan Blaskey, Civil Engineering), and one postdoctoral fellow (Dr. Peyton Thomas, INSTAAR). 

Link to the paper: