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Presents a study that documented the traditional ecological knowledge of the Alaska Native hunters of beluga whales in Cook Inlet to add information available on the population. Importance of summer feeding to Cook Inlet belugas; Predation by killer whales; Information on beluga cows and calves.
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Human activities are altering many factors that determine the fundamental properties of ecological and social systems. Is sustainability a realistic goal in a world in which many key process controls are directionally changing? To address this issue, we integrate several disparate sources of theory to address sustainability in directionally changing social-ecological systems, apply this framework to climate-warming impacts in Interior Alaska, and describe a suite of policy strategies that emerge from these analyses. Climate warming in Interior Alaska has profoundly affected factors that influence landscape processes (climate regulation and disturbance spread) and natural hazards, but has only indirectly influenced...
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The Arctic climate is changing. Permafrost is warming, hydrological processes are changing and biological and social systems are also evolving in response to these changing conditions. Knowing how the structure and function of arctic terrestrial ecosystems are responding to recent and persistent climate change is paramount to understanding the future state of the Earth system and how humans will need to adapt. Our holistic review presents a broad array of evidence that illustrates convincingly; the Arctic is undergoing a system-wide response to an altered climatic state. New extreme and seasonal surface climatic conditions are being experienced, a range of biophysical states and processes influenced by the threshold...
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Abstract: In this article we extend the theory of community prediction by presenting seven hypotheses for predicting community structure in a directionally changing world. The first three address well-studied community responses to environmental and ecological change: ecological communities are most likely to exhibit threshold changes in structure when perturbations cause large changes in limiting soil or sediment resources, dominant or keystone species, or attributes of disturbance regime that influence community recruitment. Four additional hypotheses address social-ecological interactions and apply to both ecological communities and social-ecological systems. Human responsiveness to short-term and local costs...
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