Published May 5, 2023 by Ned Rozell

A dog that pulled his way into history has given scientists insight into what makes Alaska sled dogs and other working breeds unique.

Balto’s genetic makeup shows a greater ability to process starches — examples of which are rice, beans and other plants — when compared to wolves and Greenland sled dogs.

“Through domestication, dogs became better adapted to a diet shared with people, which includes a lot of non-meat food sources and requires enhanced starch digestion,” Kathleen Morrill of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, a paper co-author, wrote in an email.

“Dogs really aren’t carnivores, they’re omnivores — you’ve seen them eating grass,” said Cristina Hansen of UAF’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, who is also head veterinarian for both the Yukon Quest and Copper Basin 300 sled dog races.

Hansen wonders if dog mushers, who vary in what they feed their dogs for maximum performance (“Ask 100 mushers, you’ll get 100 answers”), should maybe be feeding them more starch.

Balto also was more genetically diverse and therefore a bit healthier than many dogs today. It’s a trait Hansen called “hybrid vigor,” which she has seen at work many times on cold, dark trails like the ones over which Balto trotted.

“Sled dogs don’t have many breed-associated diseases,” she said. “They aren’t bred for physical traits, they’re bred for performance.”

Published May 5, 2023 by Adam Low/UAF Upward Bound

Three-dimensional printer-created projects, creative algorithms, art work and a miniature classic arcade game are just samples of work coming out of a Makerspace classroom at North Pole High School, thanks to a five-year $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The grant, secured by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, centers on providing opportunities for low-income, first-generation students who are bound for college, said Adam Low, director of UAF’s Upward Bound program.

Published May 5, 2023 by May 4th 4:46 pm

To highlight the new child care facility and the need for services in the Kotzebue area, social worker Laura Norton-Cruz and filmmaker Joshua Albeza Branstetter in April released a film, "At Home / In Home: Rural Alaska Childcare in Crisis." The 25-minute documentary was screened in Juneau last month to spark a conversation with state lawmakers about the lack of child care in Kotzebue.

Without a state-licensed center, Kotzebue is considered a child care desert — a community that doesn't have access to child care within a reasonable distance, according to Nolan Klouda, director of the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Economic Development, who spoke in the film.

The issue is not unique to Kotzebue. Klouda said that in Anchorage, there are pockets of the population that can't afford or can't get a spot at day care. The number of workers in child care dropped during the pandemic and has never recovered to pre-pandemic levels, Klouda said.

According to a 2022 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, almost 13% of Alaska parents surveyed with children under age 5 had cut their work hours to care for children.

Published May 5, 2023 by Annie Berman

As Alaska faces an increased risk of spring breakup flooding this year, scientists are asking residents to share photos documenting major rivers’ progress from ice to water to help them predict with more accuracy where flooding might occur.

The call for submissions is part of a citizen science program from the University of Alaska Fairbanks called Fresh Eyes on Ice, which originally began as a way to get kids involved with science by measuring ice thickness through their classrooms.

This year, for nearly all of Alaska’s largest rivers — including the Yukon, Tanana, Kuskokwim and Koyukuk rivers — there is an above-average potential for spring flooding, due to below-average temperatures in April throughout most of the state, which delayed melting and increased the risk of ice jam flooding.

When people submit photos of river conditions — which they can do through the university’s webpage, via a smartphone app developed by NASA or on social media — they’re asked to include the name of the river and the conditions they’re observing.

This week, the group’s Facebook page was active with photos of fresh snow on river ice, ice chunks floating in melted spots and pops of glacier-blue water around solid ice.

Published May 4, 2023 by Alaska Media, Llc., Steve Keller Designer And Application Developer

Fraley and his organization, Wildlife Conservation Society, in collaboration with the Native Village of Kotzebue, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are examining the coastal movements of sheefish in the Kotzebue Sound region by tagging fish, talking to residents and consulting historical data.

The pop-up satellite tags that researchers put on the fish from a few months to over a year record temperature, the depth the fish is traveling and the amount of light around the fish.

Sheefish is likely coming from the Selawik and Kobuk rivers, Fraley said, but this is also an open question scientists hope to confirm with the study. The population seems to thrive and this might be why the fish is dispersing further out, he said.

The effects of climate change, acutely felt in the Arctic, include changes to the seasons, warming water temperatures and declining sea ice. All of this can create more hospitable freshwater habitats in winter and affect the behavior and distribution of fish, according to the study description.

After putting out the majority of the tags on fish, the researchers are now midway through the study, Fraley said.

"We're just kind of waiting for them to pop up," he said. "Some will pop up this June and then the data will be transmitted to satellites where we can download it. And then others will pop up in 2024."

The implications of increased numbers of sheefish seem unclear so far, he said.

Published May 4, 2023 by Kavitha George, Alaska Public Media - Anchorage

Ropati is a 21-year-old senior at Columbia University, studying civil engineering and anthropology. 

When she was a kid, she said, she didn’t think she was good at math or science. When she entered middle school, her mother placed her in ANSEP, the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she began to see herself in the scientific community.  

“I remember a permafrost engineer teaching us about how we grew up in our traditional values, how even those ideas are rooted in science,” she said. 

Today, Ropati’s university research focuses on how the ecology of Alaska is impacted by climate change. One of her projects looks at the increasing abundance of fireweed, a hardy, summer wildflower known to grow back quickly after a disturbance in the soil, such as wildfire.

She’s studying how climate warming can also cause changes in soil chemistry that allow fireweed to grow further north.

“And obviously, that’s happening in the Arctic. For Native people, fireweed growth is an indicator of change, an indicator of changes coming, when a new season is coming,” she said. “My research kind of validates that pre-existing knowledge.”

Ropati, who is Yup’ik and Samoan, is intent on building a career as a scientist and climate advocate improving life for Alaskans, and importantly, centering Indigenous knowledge in her work. She’s one of this year’s Arctic Youth Ambassadors and an Arctic Resilient Communities Youth Fellow. 

Published May 4, 2023 by La'shawn Donelson, Your Alaska Link

The University of Alaska Anchorage is officially ending its only Bachelors of Arts program in theater and minor in dance due to funding cuts by the state government.

The trouble for the department began in 2020 with the university's $7 million funding cut. The Board of Regents made recommendations to eliminate several programs. Some include creative writing, sociology and theater and dance.

"And to have it disappear, when I felt like things were working really well for us and we were looking at expanding into different areas, it's been a real gut punch, to be honest," Daniel Anteau from the UAA Department of Theatre and Dance said.

Published May 4, 2023 by Petersburg Pilot

Currently, that lumber must be tested and graded by a national standards organization, and bringing an outside grader to Alaska adds significant costs, state forester Helge Eng said last fall.

Under the legislation, the University of Alaska Fairbanks would hire a teacher who would train sawmill operators to self-test their wood. Those wood products would be restricted for use in single-family homes, duplexes or triplexes. An independent building inspector would verify the quality of the lumber.

“Locally milled dimensional lumber that conforms” to state standards “could be sold directly to the end user or a contractor for use in residential structures,” Bjorkman explained in a sponsor statement.

The quality-testing training program would be available at no cost to individuals and sawmill operators. The Department of Natural Resources estimates it will cost the state $221,000 per year to run the program.

The legislation was backed by loggers and environmental groups, with letters of support from the Nature Conservancy, Alaska State Home Building Association and several small sawmills.

Published May 4, 2023 by Georgina Fernandez

University of Alaska Anchorage associate professor Micah Hahn studies the health impacts of climate change. But while searching for data on Alaska, she noticed something when she took closer look.

“When you zoom into Alaska there is a big, black hole, and a lot of times Alaska is sort of left out of these data sets,” Hahn said.

That’s when Hahn decided to fill in the missing information gaps about the impact wildfires have on the health of Alaskans. Utilizing a $1.3 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, Hahn works alongside a team of eight other resources and community members to craft an online tool to help educate communities about wildfire, smoke and the impact it has on residents health. Her project is called “Filling data gaps: Developing a community-centered tool for assessing health impacts of intersecting climate hazards, wildfire smoke exposure, and social disparities in rural tribal and aging communities in Alaska.”

Hahn’s work is also helping the development of a robust network for monitoring air quality.

While the project is still in the early phases of development, Hahn said they will start to develop a beta test of the tool by this fall and hope to have a live product within the next few years.

Published May 3, 2023

The University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) uses the occasion of Student Commencement each year to recognize individuals in the community who have offered outstanding service to the University, the State of Alaska, or Southeast communities.

Honorary degrees are bestowed on individuals who exemplify a significant and lasting contribution to the University, to the State of Alaska, or to the individual’s discipline or profession.

The UA Board of Regents approves candidates who are nominated by local campuses.

This year UAS will honor Anna Ehlers with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.

Anna Ehlers has made significant contributions toward the landscape of traditional arts and culture of Southeast Alaska and far beyond.

Anna is rooted in the traditional Tlingit art of Chilkat weaving mastery that goes far deeper than the highly technical weft and weave of mountain goat hair and cedar into exquisite clan regalia.

Her expertise includes gathering and processing of traditional materials, a deep understanding of the complex social structure of Tlingit people represented by the technical and nuanced Tlingit art formline and knowledge of clan histories captured by the classic rules of design.

Her work honors the dignity of Tlingit identity, status, and belonging.

Published May 3, 2023 by DANELLE KELLY Daily News Staff Writer

Ketchikan High School freshmen Minh-Thu Vo and Gisele Noble have been accepted to the 2023 Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program that is set to be held for five weeks on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus from May 27 through June 30.

The ANSEP program, according to information at www.ansep.net, offers college credits to participants, as well as the opportunity to experience life at a university. The program also aims to build self-esteem, determination and study skills, to offer practice working in teams, to allow the experience of living away from home, to have fun doing hands-on science and engineering projects and coursework, and to introduce the experience of earning a college degree.

Published May 3, 2023 by Warren Cornwall

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Germany and other European countries joined the United States and Canada in barring their scientists from collaborating on most projects with Russia, which controls half of the Arctic’s coastline. “We are cut off from this part of the Arctic,” says Anne Morgenstern, a permafrost scientist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute who coordinated the German presence at Samoylov. “It’s just a tragedy, the whole situation, and everybody hopes that this horrible war ends soon.”

The abrupt rupture is jeopardizing data on climate change, oceanography, and ecology that stretch back decades. On Samoylov Island, sensors that measure carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the warming permafrost are likely still operating, Morgenstern says. But none of the data is flowing to German scientists, and she questions how long the observations can be sustained without spare parts or specialized knowledge from Germany. “We suspect it’s going to be very hard for them to maintain the measurements in the long term,” she says.

Individual researchers are also struggling to keep lines of communication open. Last year, Norwegian organizers of the largest Arctic science conference, the Arctic Science Summit Week, barred Russians from participating. This year, Austrian organizers of the event allowed Russians to attend as long as they displayed no official affiliation with a Russian institution, such as listing it on a name tag. But only six Russian scientists ended up attending a gathering that drew more than 800 people, and five of those were online.

Vladimir Romanovsky, a Russian-born permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who carries both U.S. and Russian passports, traveled via Turkey to a conference in Siberia’s Yakutsk region this winter, where a good friend leads a permafrost research program. He says he’s glad he went, in part to encourage young researchers he met. “I will continue to support these relations just for those young people to have some hope.”

Yet he worries that a program he coordinates tracking permafrost temperatures across the Arctic is imperiled. He has had to abandon his practice of sending money to Russian colleagues to help support their work. He says they are reluctant to accept research money from abroad, fearing they will be labeled a “foreign agent”—which could put them at risk of government scrutiny or arrest. “The coming field season is in big question,” he says.