Research and management studies on coastal change in Western Alaska has increased rapidly in recent years, making it challenging to track existing projects, understand their cumulative insights, gauge remaining information gaps, and prioritize future projects. The goal of this effort is to identify current coastal research and management projects that are taking place in Western Alaska and to synthesize information into a report that documents the ‘project landscape’ for communities facing change, decision-makers navigating change, researchers pursuing projects, as well as funding agencies trying to prioritize where to allocate resources. To identify coastal change projects, we first conducted an extensive Internet search utilizing existing databases and online resources. We than contacted 130 stakeholders from a diverse range of university, state, federal, native and local institutions to review and comment on additional projects. We summarized the list of projects into key disciplines and topic areas. We than compared our list of current coastal projects to a list of key recommended needs identified from the 2012 Coastal Hazards Workshop. We found that the majority (38%) of current coastal change projects in Western Alaska is focused on biological system projects (e.g. fish, bird, habitat and marine mammal species). Human system projects (subsistence, local knowledge and coastal change adaptation) comprised 26% of the total number of projects occurring in the region. Landscape/Geophysical system projects (e.g. research that is related to geophysical processes along the coastline or nearshore stretches of land) represented 20% of the total number of current efforts. And oceanographic system projects (projects related to ocean currents, waves, biochemical fluxes) had the fewest number of current projects (16%). Of the total number of projects, only 32% were categorized as a “recommended need” based on knowledge gaps identified in a 2012 Coastal Hazards Workshop. Our final report provides a synthesis of current project efforts in Western Alaska that may help to (1) to foster better coordination about coastal studies in Western Alaska, (2) help practitioners and scholars learn from one another, and (3) identify information gaps that need to be addressed.
