Hannah Hoag

Category: featured

  • In Canada’s boreal forest, a new national park faces the wrongs of the past — and guards our climate future

    In Canada’s boreal forest, a new national park faces the wrongs of the past — and guards our climate future

    AUDUBON

    James Marlowe zips along the glassy lake surface of the water in his aluminum fishing boat, and the town of Łutsël K’é quickly falls from sight. We stay close to the shoreline, avoiding hidden reefs, and steer straight for his net. It’s closing in on midnight, but Great Slave Lake—the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest in the world—is flashing with fish and the tree-covered hills are aglow in the setting summer sun. Marlowe cuts the motor and begins hauling in the 150-foot net hand-over-hand.

    Splop! The first fish lands in a large plastic bin. Splop! Splop! Marlowe moves along the net, plucking whitefish from its mesh. With some effort, he untangles a 30-pound trout and heaves the rare find into the bin. “Oh, there are still more fish! It’s not going to stop, man,” he says with a laugh.

    Since he was a teen, Marlowe has hunted, trapped, and fished these wilds for caribou, moose, ducks, whitefish, and lake trout. Like his neighbors and ancestors of the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation, he’s followed traplines that meander from the forest to  tundra and strung nets under the lake ice to harvest food. “We depend on the land and the water for survival,” says Marlowe. “It’s like our grocery store.”

    In the early 1990s, however, diamond mining and mineral exploration in Canada’s Northwest Territories began to threaten this tradition of living off the land. The mines produced some jobs and revenue for the community, but they also caused problems. The industry’s high interest in the area concerned the elders, who then directed Marlowe’s generation to find a way to protect the land, water, and animals for their own children—and for the survival of the Dene culture, language, and way of life.

    After more than 15 years of discussion, the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation has now signed a landmark agreement with the governments of Canada and the Northwest Territories to form a massive new protected area called Thaidene Nëné, or “Land of the Ancestors.” Almost twice as large as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone national parks combined, Thaidene Nëné encompasses more than 6.4 million acres, stretching from the easternmost tip of Great Slave Lake northeast toward the Arctic territory of Nunavut. It spans the boreal forest and its transition to the heath-dominated tundra, making it one of the only protected areas in Canada to straddle the tree line—an important bridge for plants and animals that may migrate as the climate changes.

    .::. Read more at Audubon Magazine.

  • Researchers pull together to get fuller picture of Greenland sled dog

    Researchers pull together to get fuller picture of Greenland sled dog

    Greenland’s sled dogs are a distinctive part of the nation’s culture — but they’re also declining. (Carsten Egevang / The Qimmeq Project)

    ARCTIC TODAY —

    The Qimmeq Project is an interdisciplinary effort to better understand and preserve Greenland’s distinctive sled dogs.

    For more than 10,000 years, dogs have been an integral part of Arctic culture. They have guided sleds across frozen seas, barked warnings of polar bears and sniffed out seal breathing holes.

    “Having sled dogs is a big part of our history and identity. It is one of the main reasons that we as a culture are still alive, that we still live in the Arctic,” said Manumina Lund Jensen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Greenland, who presented her project at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland in October.

    Despite their dominant role in the culture, sled dogs have been in decline in Greenland for the past century. Their numbers have dwindled as traditional hunting tailed off, motorized vehicles gained traction, fatal diseases took root, and elders, who had deep knowledge about breeding and training sled dogs, passed on.

    “Climate change has had a really big impact on how we use our dogs and if we have dogs at all,” said Jensen. “If we don’t have sea ice you cannot go dog sledding and you cannot hunt for food.” Jensen’s research focuses on understanding the importance of the dog and dogsled culture.

    Greenland’s sled dogs and their cultural heritage are at risk of extinction. The number of dogs has declined from 25,000 in 2002 to fewer than 15,000 in 2016.

    Jensen is part of an interdisciplinary research team working on the Qimmeq Project, the “sled dog” project. These anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, biologists and veterinarians are studying the health, genetics and cultural and historical significance of the Greenland sled dog, in an effort to understand its history, use and significance.

    Morten Meldgaard, a professor at the University of Greenland and the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who is leading the project, says that recent research on pre-contact dogs in the Americas highlights the risk that the Greenland sled dog could die out.

    Dogs arrived in the Americas from Siberia and spread throughout the continents alongside people, according to a recent study. When the Europeans arrived, they brought their own dogs, and native American dogs virtually disappeared. Almost no trace of their legacy remains in modern American dogs. “It puts into perspective what we’re dealing with in the Arctic,” said Meldgaard, who also presented in Reykjavik.

    After the project launched, Meldgaard and his colleagues realized sled dog health needed a more prominent role in the project. “We’re identifying the science questions with the people who are going to use the knowledge we create,” he said. Access to vaccines that protect against highly contagious diseases, including canine distemper and parvovirus, and veterinary care is limited in many parts of Greenland.

    “People say that if the sled dog disappears, part of their soul and identify disappears,” said Meldgaard. “It is of great importance to be able to keep the animal — and the culture — alive.”

    .::. Read the story at ArcticToday.

  • Butterflies in the storm

    Butterflies in the storm

    As Hurricane Irma was bearing down on the Florida Keys last September, Erica Henry was watching from Raleigh, North Carolina. Henry, an ecologist, had packed up and left the Keys at the start of hurricane season and was supposed to be working on her doctoral thesis. But instead of writing code for a butterfly population model, she was checking and re-checking the hurricane’s projected path and posting anxious updates to Twitter.

    For six years, Henry had been studying some of the rarest endangered butterflies in North America, and she feared the storm seething through the Atlantic might gobble them up for good. “We always talk about how one hurricane could be the end of them,” said Henry. The day Irma slammed into the Keys, Henry approached one of the members of her advisory committee with a question: “What happens if one of your study species goes extinct during your dissertation?”

    Of the 25 native butterflies on the U.S. endangered species list, four reside in Florida. Henry is studying two of them, the Miami blue (Cyclargus thomasi bethunebakeri) and Bartram’s scrub hairstreak (Strymon acis bartrami). A former ski bum who wearied of waiting tables, Henry now copes with south Florida’s blistering sun, thorny bushes, and infinite mosquitoes in an effort to grasp what helps these butterflies thrive—and what might stave off their demise.

    For decades, efforts to save the world’s rarest butterflies have come up short. Many species have only become rarer—or extinct—sometimes after scientists and conservationists adopted seemingly cautious interventions that turned dire. Nick Haddad, Henry’s supervisor, likes to tell a story about the large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion eutyphron). First recorded in 1795, it became extinct in the British Isles in 1979.

    More than a hundred years ago, conservationists erected fences around fields that housed the disappearing butterfly to keep out both butterfly hunters and cattle. But it turned out grazers were key to the butterfly’s survival, keeping grasses short so that ants could squirrel the caterpillars below ground for 10 months until the butterflies emerged. (Butterfly larvae look remarkably like ant larvae, so the ants carry them into their nests where the butterfly larvae feast on developing ants.) Over time, the fields became overgrown, the soil temperature dropped, and other ant species with no interest in the large blue moved in.

    Fencing off the fields “was exactly the wrong thing to do,” said Haddad, an ecologist at Michigan State University who studies wildlife corridors, butterflies, and bees. “The very acts of conservation were dooming butterflies.” Another large blue subspecies from Sweden has since been introduced in the UK—and cattle munching on grasses have contributed to their success.

    Now, after watching endangered butterfly populations dwindle and sometimes wink out, butterfly ecologists are finally getting a handle on what it takes to give a rare butterfly a leg up. Farming, urbanization, and forestry have carved up habitat, wiped out key plant species, and squelched natural disturbances like fire, flooding, and grazing, that help keep butterflies alive. And when isolated fragments of rare habitat sit adjacent to homes or schools—or on the edge of rapidly rising seas—the extinction risk only grows. Ecologists have discovered that by re-introducing this natural disturbance, often in combination with captive breeding programs, they can set butterflies on track to recovery.

    .::. Keep reading at bioGraphic.

  • With warming temperatures, Canada’s Arctic glaciers are melting faster

    With warming temperatures, Canada’s Arctic glaciers are melting faster

    Researchers in two separate studies documented dramatic changes beginning in the 1990s after decades of stability.

    Most of Canada’s Arctic glaciers are shrinking — and some are already gone.

    A survey of 1,773 glaciers across northern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada has found more than three-quarters had lost area between 1999 and 2015. Overall, the glaciers lost about six percent of their total ice coverage, the equivalent of 1,705 square kilometers (658 square miles).

    Adrienne White, from the Laboratory of Cryospheric Research University of Ottawa, and her colleagues used optical satellite imagery to inventory and measure the area of the glaciers on Canada’s northernmost island.

    Over the past 16 years, the area of 150 glaciers had shrunk by half or more. Two ice shelves had melted and 19 glaciers with floating ice tongues had retreated to their grounding lines and now ended at the ocean. Five glaciers had been lost entirely.

    A rise in air temperature has contributed to the glacier melt, said White.

    On average, temperatures in the region have increased 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since the 1940s. But there was a strong shift in the mid-1990s, when the mean annual temperature increase accelerated to 0.74C (1.3F) per decade from 0.12C (0.22F). The average summer air temperature shifted to above freezing from below freezing since 2000, said White.

    “The biggest percent per decade changes occurred on short and small glaciers at low elevation,” said White, who presented the work at the Polar 2018 Open Science Conference in Davos, Switzerland, in June. The study was published in the Journal of Glaciology on June 27.

    .::. Keep reading at Arctic Today.

  • Cost of Arctic fieldwork limits research

    Cost of Arctic fieldwork limits research

    SCIENCE — Mark Mallory, who has studied Arctic seabirds for more than 20 years, often notes in his scientific papers how expensive it is to conduct fieldwork in the far north, as have some of his colleagues. But when they recently tallied up their costs systematically, they were shocked to find the true price of northern research was eight times greater than for similar studies of seabirds in southern locations.

    The findings, reported on 4 June online in Arctic Science,  are among the first to quantify the high costs of Arctic research. The authors say funding sources are often insufficient to cover these expenses, limiting scientists from collecting enough data to understand how Arctic ecosystems are responding to climate change.

    Mallory, a professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, Canada, convened seabird researchers who work in the Arctic and in temperate regions. Based on their actual expenses, they estimated costs for a generic scenario in which three researchers establish a field camp for 4 weeks to monitor the breeding success of seabirds, including travel; accommodation; and shipping food, equipment, and supplies for sites in Nunavut and northern Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada; Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago; Greenland; and the Aleutian Islands. The researchers compared these estimates to calculations for southern locales.

    .::. Keep reading in Science.