Published Apr 25, 2024 by Staff Report

Verdi’s “Requiem” is closing out Eduard Zilberkant’s 2023/24 season.

Zilberkant is the conductor of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, which is presenting its year-end finale at 4 p.m. Sunday in Davis Concert Hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The concert also includes the Fairbanks Symphony Choir and guest soloists Ekaterina Kim, Elise Quagliata, Adam Diegel and Zaikuan Song. A pre-concert lecture about “Requiem” is slated for 3 p.m. in the Great Hall.

Published Apr 25, 2024 by Yereth RosenJames BrooksJames BrooksJohn Tetpon

Four new research projects selected for funding in a University of Alaska Anchorage program will address some of the most pressing problems facing the state: climate change, marine ecosystem health and losses in the labor force.

The projects, each designed to run for two years, were winners in an annual competition that uses an endowment created from a $15 million donation ConocoPhillips made in 2008 to UAA, the university said.

In all, more than $500,000 was awarded from the ConocoPhillips Arctic Science and Engineering endowment to the four projects’ researchers, the university said.

The winning projects were celebrated at a ceremony held last week at UAA.

One project will examine how loss of Arctic and subarctic ice in a rapidly warming climate is affecting Alaskan water resources. 

Another project, led by Utpal Dutta, a civil engineering professor at UAA, will use a microgravity survey to identify places where thawing, unstable permafrost may threaten buildings or infrastructure.

A project led by UAA Assistant Professor Amy Bishop, will investigate the accumulation of mercury in Alaska pinnipeds — the animals that include walruses, seals and sea lions — gathering more information about whether coastal communities that rely on marine ecosystems for food might be stressed.

The grant-winning project on workforce development, with UAA Associate Professor Patrick Tomco as principal investigator, aims to set up a long-term student and researcher exchange program between UAA and the University of Lyon 1 Claude Bernard in France.

Published Apr 25, 2024 by Margaret Bauman

A new analysis integrating international salmon studies from the North Pacific Ocean, that date back to the 1950s, is giving fisheries researchers new insight on salmon and their tolerances of varied ocean temperatures. 

The federally funded project, led by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), uses information compiled from numerous individual reports published by nations and agencies who funded those reports, but never fully compiled them into an overarching database or analyzed them comprehensively at this scale, UAF researchers said. 

The data collectively represents over 44,000 high seas survey gear hauls across the North Pacific and provide contrast from other salmon research, which tends to focus on river habitat, they said. 

Curry Cunningham, an assistant professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, said this ocean-based portion of salmon life cycles is arguably overlooked, at least in terms of the grand investment in salmon research.  

“As someone who always wondered where all these fish went when they left Bristol Bay, seeing that pattern come to life was so satisfying,” Cunningham said.  

Research methods varied in these decades of study, but they consistently noted the water temperature and location where salmon were caught. That information allowed researchers to create maps with unprecedented detail showing the areas that various salmon species occupy at sea. Some maps, for example, highlight a hotspot for Chinooks gathering in the Bering Sea. They chart the trail that maturing sockeye tend to take from the North Pacific and Gulf of Alaska toward the Alaska Peninsula, traveling through passes into the Bering Sea outside Bristol Bay throughout the spring and summer.