EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Photographic Legacy for Climate Change Research

Tundra, shoreline, lake, and forest conditions of the arctic and subarctic
Northwest Alaska, USA

Explanation:  This week I present a montage I created from photos taken during a major set of flights over the arctic and subarctic of northwest Alaska.  These are but a tiny sample of an immense catalog of photos and videos to document current conditions from which future changes can be measured.  

During July 16-18, 2013, my ecologist colleague Dr. Torre Jorgenson and I flew in tiny, four-seater airplanes -- a Cessna 185 with floats for landing on tundra lakes, and a Cessna 206 with oversized "tundra tires" for landing on remote river bars and tundra river banks.  I outfitted each plane with two cameras (a GoPro and a Drift camera) secured to the underwing or undercarriage and set to do timelapse photos at 5-second intervals.  We also had three additional cameras, hand held, shooting through the planes' windows. 

Over three days, we flew 1,609 miles (2,5590 km) into some of the most remote wilderness on the planet, and took a total of 19,167 photos, as well as enough high-resolution videos to provide 290,580 individual frames.  

Each photo is geotagged to precise latitude and longitude, as is the entire set of flight paths, shown as the blue routes in the center of the montage, above.  This is so future researchers can return to the same paths and locations and record conditions altered due to climate change and related dynamics of this fast-shifting high-latitude realm.  

The publication detailing this project is available at https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ds846.

  

Information:
     Marcot, B. G., M. T. Jorgenson, and A. R. DeGange. 2014. Low-altitude photographic transects of the Arctic Network of national park units and Selawik National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, July 2013. USGS Data Series 846. https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ds846. US Geological Survey. Anchorage, AK. 44 pp.

Acknowledgments:
      My thanks to Torre Jorgenson for sharing the adventure and providing navigation during the flights, and to personnel of the National Park Service (Robert Winfree, James Lawler, David Swanson, Frank Hayes, Nick Dougal) and U.S. Geological Survey (Tony DeGange, Dennis Walworth) for all the administrative and technical support.  My thanks also to pilots Jim Kincaid and Anthony Remboldt of Northwest Aviation, Kotzebue, Alaska.

     So if one picture is worth a thousand words, then our 19,167 photos and 290,580 video frames must be worth 309,747,000 words ... which we hope will translate into future climate-change research based on this project.