Registration is now live for the 2024 Alaska Stream Crossing Virtual Workshop!
The workshop will take place March 18-21, 2024 10:00am – 3:00pm daily.
This event is free and we are using the Whova event platform to enhance our opportunity to engage with meeting organizers, workshop presenters and attendees.
We will also be hosting two book club opportunities to discuss and share thoughts about our keynote speaker, Ben Goldfarb’s book: Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. For those in Anchorage, please join us for a potluck in the (note updated location and date) Spruce/Willow Room BP Energy Center Thursday, March 7, 2024 from 5:30-7:30pm; and for everyone through a virtual gathering on Friday, March 15, 2024 from 3:00-5:00pm (Alaska Time).
Greetings all – Saturday, September 17th is International Coastal Clean-up Day. Here in Juneau, Alaska we are pitching in to clean-up the Switzer Creek Watershed. Please join us at 9am to gather trash bags – supplied from our friends at Alaska Brewing Co. (via their Coastal Code efforts). We are joining in with our partners at the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition, Juneau Audubon Society, Ratchet Constructs, and Juneau Makerspace to clean-up this important watershed as well as other coastal areas around town. Here are more details:
Description: Sharing what we are learning through the use of film continues to be an exceptional way to communicate advances in science and fisheries management, showcase ways communities are engaging in local fisheries and stewardship efforts, and capture the beauty and diversity of fish across Alaska. To accompany this year’s AFS Alaska Chapter meeting we are hosting a film festival inspired by this year’s meeting title: Changing Tides – Outlook for the Future | Insights from the Past. In addition to films that highlight the work of our membership, we will share films that capture a historical perspective of fish use in Alaska and highlight advances made in learning from the past to advance how we expand knowledge of our fisheries resources and manage for a vibrant future.
Contributed by: Court Pegus, AFS Alaska Student Member: ccpegus@alaska.edu (UAF College of Rural and Community Development, Kuskokwim Campus and Orutsararmiut Native Council)
Brief film description: Several authors report that teaching styles which frame Western learning concepts in a cultural context are an effective means to engage Indigenous students in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) focused educational curriculum. Native Hawaiian children and Alaska Native rural middle school students were observed to perform better on subjects in which teaching methods incorporated principles of cultural congruence. Alaska Native students are the smallest demographic of students enrolled in college and represent approximately 250,000 of the 19 million college students attending schools in the United States and experience some of the highest dropout rates. This pattern prevails throughout all stages of the educational process (kindergarten-college) in almost all public schools in Alaska. Educational ceilings faced by Alaska Native youth hinder advancement to college and reduce opportunities to pursue research careers. The COVID-19 pandemic global outbreak has spread worldwide within the last two years creating observable changes to social practices including teaching customs within a relatively short time scale. In response to this deadly virus, many educational institutes have shifted teaching practices from face-to-face education to remote learning. While live-stream class sessions can be an efficient means of lecturing to large groups of widely dispersed students, this teaching style may not ensure adequate inclusion of physical or cultural activities to enhance the learning experience. It remains unclear how this new digitally-based format of teaching will be perceived by non-traditional and Indigenous students. As a collaborative effort, The Orutsararmiut Native Council and the University of Alaska Fairbanks hosted a science summer course to a diverse cohort of Native students. Course work focused on marine science and STEM education using teaching styles that included face-to-face education as well as remote learning (ZOOM classes). This short documentary presented captures teaching styles that contextualize STEM in a culturally relevant frame of reference and provide an outline and guide for other educators that teach in rural communities. A follow-up study from this effort will examine the instructor’s perceptions of student’s responses to the two forms of teaching styles as well as challenges associated with placing teaching activities in a cultural framework.
Brief film description: Along the Yukon River, NOAA, Alaska DF&G, the Yukon Delta Fisheries Development Association, and local fishermen have collaborated to study Chinook salmon for years. In 2020, the pandemic shut down these efforts, so the local communities initiated a citizen science project to fill the gap. There is also a web-story that goes along with this: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/community-steps-continue-yukon-river-salmon-research-during-pandemic
Mosaic – The Salmon Wilderness of Bristol Bay, Alaska
Contributed by: Daniel Schindler, Jason Ching, and Chris Boatright; University of Washington – Alaska Salmon Program; cboat@uw.edu, 206-930-8979
Brief Film Description: The film highlights the connection between habitat and the long term stability of Bristol Bay’s salmon populations and fisheries productivity.
*Both videos can be found on the Ecosystem Status Report webpage. This web page also contains the actual Ecosystem Status Reports and In Briefs for the three LME’s of Alaska.
Brief Film Description: The Alaska coastal rainforest center teams up with organizations around the world to understand the incredible forest of and ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest.
Brief Film Description: Community Forests and locally driven workforce are the crux of the Hoonah Native Forest Partnership. This video dives into why stream restoration is needed and how its linked to maintaining healthy fish, people and communities.
Brief Film Description: During the summer of 2021, a team from the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition (SAWC) worked with the Angoon Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) to remove a culvert from a remote area on Admiralty Island. This fantastic group of youths did a lot of work, alongside SAWC staff, to dig, carry, saw, and finally, remove a culvert that was blocking fish passage near Cube Cove. This project is part of a larger initiative to improve fish habitat across Admiralty Island.
The Alaska Section of the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) held the 2019 meeting in Juneau September 17-19, 2019 with support from the Southeast Alaska Fish Habitat Partnership. This year, sessions focused on weather and water extremes (including drought), water rights and reservations, fish habitat, hazards including glacier dammed lake floods and avalanches, permafrost hydrology, and water quality.
Check here for links to AWRA resources and 2019 meeting materials, including the meeting agenda, presentation abstracts and direct links to pdf copies of presentation materials, resources shared for rapid talk sections of the meeting, and links to posters shared during the poster session.
If you would like to be added to the AWRA mailing list or otherwise get involved, please contact awra.alaska@gmail.com.
Please join us Thursday, November 7th from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm for an evening of information sharing and celebrating the return of salmon to Southeast Alaska and the Tongass National Forest.
There will be a few short presentations from local agencies and short films capturing the habitats of Southeast Alaska and the Tongass National Forest, home to all five species of Pacific salmon.
The National Fish Habitat Partnership and Fish Habitat Section have teamed up to host a film festival for the Reno meeting – Reno-vating Habitat for Fish and Wildlife: A Film Festival Highlighting Collaborative Habitat Conservation and Its Benefits. This festival will take place each day of the conference and include over 80 films shown during 14 showing sessions.
Films will showcase examples where resource practitioners and others come together to protect, restore and enhance freshwater, coastal and terrestrial habitats that support the needs of fish and wildlife. These films share how improving habitat brings other benefits like improved water quality and socio-economic returns to communities. Film categories include habitat conservation projects, on-the-ground restoration examples, and include other films that capture the dynamic landscapes and unique habitats that are home to our fish and wildlife. This festival offers a unique opportunity for meeting attendees to collaborate and learn about successful habitat conservation stories from across the country. Each showing session will include some time at the beginning for available filmers and colleagues to share additional information about their films as well as engage in question and answer dialog towards the end of each showing session.
For Information on the times for specific films, please visit the detailed schedule in front of the room, the registration desk, or visit this page: http://bit.ly/AFSfilmfest.
The website for the Southeast Alaska Drought Workshop (Southeast Alaska Drought: Refining Drought Metrics for a Temperate Rainforest held in Juneau May 7, 2019) is now live with handouts from the workshop, recordings of the presentations and presentation files. Please share this webpage with your communities, organizations, and anyone whom you think may be interested.
Next steps include developing a synthesis of information presented at the workshop, taking this information from the workshop to help refine drought metrics for
Southeast Alaska, gathering information on community driven next steps and implementing community driven next steps. As these additional products are developed we’ll upload them to the website and send out email notifications.
This April, the
Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition and Southeast Alaska Fish Habitat
Partnership teamed up to bring together over 70 participants across Alaska and
the Pacific Northwest, including state and federal agencies, university
researchers, Tribes, and NGOs, for a regional discussion about the state of
eDNA research and existing and future applications across Alaska. The agenda, a
brief meeting synopsis and the informative and valuable presentations relayed
by leading researchers on the subject are available at the partnership’s
website at https://seakfhp.org/edna-in-alaska-1-day-workshop-april-1-2019/.
Presentations and
discussion touched on topics of interest garnered in early outreach efforts
including:
a desire for a primer on the science of eDNA sampling, including
methodology issues related to single and multiple species investigations;
interest in using eDNA for habitat mapping (for the presence of anadromous
species to support greater conservation actions through available habitat
permitting protections as well as early detection of aquatic invasive species)
and to support abundance estimates of commercially and culturally important aquatic
species like salmon and hooligan;
an overview of existing sampling efforts taking place across
Alaska; and
recommendations for developing sampling protocols and cost
considerations for potential future projects.
Next steps include exploring capacity to support a statewide Alaska eDNA Working Group, advance opportunities to share data resources especially information about primers that exist for Alaska species, and prioritize monitoring efforts especially for aquatic invasive species detection. For more information contact the SEAKFHP coordinator at: coordinator@sealaskafishhabitat.org
Healthy Habitat is What Makes the Fish Magic Happen!
