The goal of the Northwest Territories (NWT) Protected Areas Strategy (PAS) is to protect special natural and cultural areas, and core representative areas within each ecoregion of the NWT. Core representative areas are intact areas that best represent the biological diversity of an ecoregion. Protecting core representative areas will help maintain healthy wildlife populations and ecological processes. The PAS recognizes the need to apply the methods of conservation science to identify and protect core representative areas in each ecoregion. A methodology is being developed to identify options for core representative areas in the NWT, starting with the 16 ecoregions outlined in the Mackenzie Valley Action Plan....
In June, 1998, the Department of Health and Social Services released Shaping Our Future, A Strategic Plan for Health and Wellness described by ASTIS record 66579]. This plan builds on the Med-Emerg plan which was released in 1997 described by ASTIS record 66596]. Shaping Our Future presents 22 strategic directions and some 90 tasks. The Med-Emerg report offered 49 recommendations. Three years earlier, the Special Committee on Health and Social Services had released its final report with 39 recommendations. The Minister's Forum on Health and Social Services has reviewed these documents, and we agree they include worthy objectives, and generally, they represent the views of the people we heard from during our community...
The latitudinal gradient of the start of the growing season (SOS) and the end of the growing season (EOS) were quantified in Alaska (61°N to 71°N) using satellite-based and ground-based datasets. The Alaskan evergreen needleleaf forests are sparse and the understory vegetation has a substantial impact on the satellite signal. We evaluated SOS and EOS of understory and tundra vegetation using time-lapse camera images. From the comparison of three SOS algorithms for determining SOS from two satellite datasets (SPOT-VEGETATION and Terra-MODIS), we found that the satellite-based SOS timing was consistent with the leaf emergence of the forest understory and tundra vegetation. The ensemble average of SOS over all satellite...
This dissertation studies the impress of Cold War military investment on Alaska's cultural landscape. From 1946 through 1989, Alaska served as the United States' Cold War sentinel and the air defense shield against the threat of Soviet attack over the North Pole. During the Cold War the US military was a dominant force in the state economy and by the end of the period had built approximately 435 military facilities and installations in Alaska, ranging in size from those contained in individual, isolated buildings to massive, self-contained cities. This investment has had different types and degrees of impacts on different places. The study explores these patterns with respect primarily to the facilities' temporal...
Post-fire regrowth is an important component of carbon dynamics in Canada's boreal forests, yet observations of structural development following fire are lacking across this remote and expansive region. Here, we used Landsat time-series data (1985–2010) to detect high-severity fires in the Boreal Shield West ecozone of Canada, and assessed post-fire structure for > 600 burned patches (> 13,000 ha) using airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) data acquired in 2010. We stratified burned areas into patches of dense (> 50% canopy cover) and open (20–50% canopy cover) forests based on a classification of pre-fire Landsat imagery, and used these patches to establish a 25-year chronosequence of structural development...