Achievement

Linking Ecosystem Services with Use by Communities. Our research identifies the ecosystem services available to Alaskan indigenous communities, their harvest for subsistence, and the sharing of these resources among households within communities. In particular, we document social networks based on patterns of sharing of harvested food, hunting equipment, and cash. In addition, we use down-scaled climate scenarios to project changes in the availability of these resources over the coming decades in response to climate change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study that integrates these ecological and social dimensions of resource use by indigenous communities in the context of climate change. The research is important because these communities have depended on these resources for millennia, but are experiencing rapid changes in resource availability and in the social and economic context for sharing. This research engages multiple trainees and IGERT faculty.