Recent news and events at ABR.
We are in the midst of a busy season with many competing obligations: attendance and presentations at conferences; reports about fieldwork completed in summer and fall; and engaging with our community as we hunker down and bundle up for Alaska’s winter that finally showed up this week. Conferences like the Resource Development Council’s Alaska Resources Conference provide a great opportunity to hear what many of our industry clients have to share about the current year in review and outlook for 2017. ABR takes pride in supporting responsible development efforts by clients including ConocoPhillips, BP Alaska, Caelus Energy, and Hilcorp. We also listened attentively to what Governor Bill Walker and Commissioner Andy Mack had to say about the State’s plans for the Alaska LNG pipeline project.
Sally Kieper from UAF's School of Education invited ABR Senior Scientist Dr. JJ Frost to come with her to Unalakleet, AK as a visiting scientist to speak with classes K-12 about environmental science and change. Rather than drone on and on about Science, he thought it would be cool to have students explore changes in their own community and surrounding landscape.
The goal of the National Park Service (NPS)’s Inventory & Monitoring Program is to improve park management though greater reliance on scientific information. ABR is proud to be a partner in this program by collecting and analyzing data for use by NPS. In August 2016, ABR's Ecological Land Survey (ELS) team conducted fieldwork for a soils inventory of Katmai National Park & Preserve (KATM). The objective of the inventory is to gain a better understanding of how soils contribute to the richness and character of the park by identifying local-scale ecosystems and soil types and mapping their distribution.
This July, a field team led by ABR Senior Scientist Gerald "JJ" Frost completed the first field season for a multi-disciplinary study of environmental change on the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta, western Alaska.This study is funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) and integrates information from the satellite record, a network of long-term ecological field plots, and traditional ecological knowledge contributed by Y-K Delta residents to understand the biophysical drivers and ecosystem impacts of environmental change on the YK.