Published Jun 18, 2024 by Carter DeJong

In May, after three months of negotiations, the University of Alaska and its graduate student workers union reached a labor contract agreement that is set to take effect on July 1.

The UA Board of Regents unanimously approved the contract on May 3 and the Alaska Graduate Workers Association (AGWA) — which represents hundreds of graduate workers throughout UA — voted to approve on May 1.

Funding to implement the contract is included in the Alaska Legislature’s state budget. However, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has yet to sign the budget bill into law.

Here is what Alaska’s graduate student workers will receive — or won’t — once the contract takes effect....

Published Jun 18, 2024 by Lauren Maxwell

Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved Africans in Texas were finally told they were free, months after the Civil War had ended and two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The day is considered the end of slavery in the U.S.

Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021 and a municipal holiday in Anchorage in 2023. Last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy received a bill sponsored by Senator Elvi-Gray Jackson, D-Anchorage, that would recognize June 19 as an annually observed state holiday. He has not indicated whether he will sign the bill, which already has the support of many in the Alaska State Legislature.

Festivities started over the weekend on the Anchorage Park Strip. On Monday, the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce held a joint event with the Alaska Black Caucus which included guest speaker U.S. Representative Mary Peltola. Pelota spoke about the importance of including all voices in community decisions and government to insure a greater level of success.

“The importance of having diversity in all of the things that we are working on, all the boards, at all levels, whether it’s municipal, state, federal ... diversity is where it’s at,” Peltola said.

The Juneteenth holiday will take place on Wednesday, June 19. A ceremony will be held at 6 p.m. that day at the Fine Arts Building on the University of Alaska Anchorage Campus.

Published Jun 17, 2024 by Rod Boyce

A new machine-learning system developed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks can automatically produce detailed maps from satellite data to show locations of likely beetle-killed spruce trees in Alaska, even in forests of low and moderate infestation where identification is otherwise difficult.

The automated process can help forestry and wildfire managers in their decisions. That’s critical as the beetle infestation spreads.

The Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection calls the spruce beetle “the most damaging insect in Alaska’s forests.”

The identification system by assistant professor Simon Zwieback at the UAF Geophysical Institute was detailed in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing on May 18. Zwieback is also affiliated with the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics.

The work fills a knowledge gap: how to automatically map likely spruce beetle infestations in areas of low to moderate severity.

Published Jun 17, 2024 by Yereth RosenLia ChienYereth RosenYereth Rosen

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy, the largest U.S. icebreaker, is on its way to Alaska for the first of three Arctic scientific missions planned over the coming months.

The Healy departed on Wednesday from Seattle, its home port, the Coast Guard said. Its first mission will bring scientists to the Beaufort Sea to service underwater moorings, devices installed to collect information about oceanic conditions. Scientists on the mission will also survey the currents between the Bering Sea and the Canadian Beaufort Sea. Other work to be conducted includes monitoring of Arctic algal blooms, the Coast Guard said.

In its second mission, the Healy is scheduled to carry early career scientists on a cruise through the Northwest Passage to Greenland. That mission is intended to train scientists in Arctic research practices and is modeled after a similar mission conducted last year on the Sikuliaq, a research vessel owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Healy’s third scheduled mission is to gather data for the Global Ocean Ship-Based Hydrographic Investigations Program, an international scientific program established in 2007. That work will collect high-resolution data across the Arctic basin, the Coast Guard said. 

The Healy’s cruises are among several scheduled for research vessels in Alaska and Arctic waters in coming months.

The Seward-based Sikuliaq, which completed some West Coast missions in the spring, has already been deployed in the Gulf of Alaska to continue long-term research there. The Sikuliaq has Alaska research cruises scheduled through September.

The Sikuliaq, which is named for the Inupiaq term meaning “young ice,” is designed to sail through relatively thin ice.

Other ships are also scheduled to conduct research cruises to collect information about fish stocks, whales, seabed features and sea ice, among other subjects, according to the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee.