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How the Park Service Works Through the Arctic Council for Alaska's Arctic Parks

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic, says a tagline the authors quote: melting sea ice, shifting species ranges, and more development, transportation and tourism affect the whole planet. Alaska's national parks are huge and remote, which makes them hard to inventory and monitor, and their ecosystems have few parallels elsewhere in the United States. National Park Service (NPS) authors say that managing them well therefore takes data and lessons from the other Arctic nations, and they describe how the Park Service gets them through the Arctic Council, as that work stood when they wrote.

Why parks look beyond their borders

The article places the effort in U.S. Arctic policy: a National Strategy for the Arctic Region in 2013 and an implementation plan in 2014 called for responsible stewardship of healthy, resilient ecosystems, and in 2015 an executive order, Enhancing Coordination of National Efforts in the Arctic, recognized Arctic environmental stewardship as vital to the national interest. That year Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit the Arctic, including Kotzebue and Kenai Fjords National Park.

The approach the authors favor is ecosystem-based management. It treats natural and human systems as interconnected and aims to keep ecological systems whole so they go on providing biodiversity, protection from extreme events, clean air and water and food security. For park managers, it means looking beyond the unit to wider patterns and trends, as programs such as the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Networks, the Bureau of Land Management's Rapid Ecoregional Assessments, the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and the North Slope Science Initiative already do. In Alaska the vastness and inaccessibility of parks make that harder, which is why access to data from other Arctic nations matters for judging the status and trend of park resources and preparing for change.

The Arctic Council in brief

The Arctic Council, established in 1996, is an intergovernmental forum for cooperation among Arctic nations, Arctic Indigenous peoples and other interested parties. Its members are the eight Arctic nations: the United States, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Kingdom of Denmark (for Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Finland and the Russian Federation. Six Indigenous organizations hold Permanent Participant status: the Aleut International Association, Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwich'in Council International, Inuit Circumpolar Council, Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North and Saami Council. Non-Arctic nations and non-governmental organizations can join as observers. The Council is mainly advisory and does not enforce its guidelines, assessments or recommendations.

Most of its work is done in six working groups, on contaminants, monitoring and assessment, conservation of flora and fauna (CAFF), emergency response, protection of the marine environment (PAME) and sustainable development. The chair rotates every two years, starting with Canada in 1996-1998. The United States took the chair for the second time in April 2015, with priorities of improving economic and living conditions for Arctic communities, Arctic Ocean safety, security and stewardship, and addressing the impacts of climate change; it was due to pass to Finland in 2017.

What the Park Service does there

  • Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CAFF). Set up in 2004, it is a network of networks that tries to harmonize monitoring of marine, coastal, terrestrial and freshwater systems across scales and borders. The United States has taken part since 2010. The NPS Alaska Regional Office and BLM Alaska, with the North Slope Science Initiative, co-lead the U.S. effort with Denmark, and NPS and the U.S. Geological Survey co-lead the coastal monitoring plan with Canada, which is to include traditional knowledge alongside western science. The NPS Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network supplies data records, its way of choosing what to monitor helped shape the program's terrestrial and coastal plans, and its protocols for remote sensing, permafrost and coastal erosion are shared with it.

A Red Knot, an imperiled Arctic migratory bird

The Red Knot is an imperiled Arctic migratory bird (photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

  • Arctic Migratory Bird Initiative (CAFF). Over 75% of the bird species that breed in Alaska leave in the fall, and the parks hold tens of millions of acres of protected breeding habitat, so conserving birds means conserving breeding, stopover and wintering places far beyond any park. The initiative sets priority actions for imperiled species such as the Yellow-billed Loon and the Red Knot and covers the world's four main flyways; Alaska matters for all but the African-Eurasian one. In September 2016 NPS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration co-chaired a joint CAFF and PAME session at the World Conservation Congress in Honolulu, where the initiative was one of two case studies showing how the Arctic affects the rest of the world.
  • Marine protected areas (PAME). Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and Cape Krusenstern National Monument include 946 miles of shoreline and 115,157 acres of marine ecosystems, protect fishes, migratory birds and marine mammals and provide subsistence opportunities, which makes them marine protected areas. A U.S. chairmanship priority is a panarctic network of such areas, and NPS gives recommendations to the federal advisory committee on them and supports a joint PAME and CAFF project on Arctic marine protected and important areas, in three phases over three years, 2015-2017.

People in a boat fishing off the coast

Arctic people depend on marine resources for subsistence (NPS photo).

What the authors conclude

The parks' relatively intact ecosystems bring benefits beyond their own borders: subsistence use for Alaska Natives, recreation and solitude, biodiversity, resilience to natural hazards, carbon storage and clean water. Large, intact protected areas also give habitat to migratory species under stress elsewhere and let species shift their ranges as the climate changes. The Arctic Council, the authors say, gives NPS scientists and managers a forum to share information and learn from colleagues and Arctic residents facing similar challenges, so that decisions at many scales can draw on global science as well as local needs.

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