Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Marine Arctic Resilience, Adaptations and Transformations

University Of Alaska Anchorage Campus, Anchorage AK

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support for research projects that focus on Resilience in a Rapidly Changing Arctic. Integrated teams of scientists and stakeholders will address key areas of arctic resilience understanding and action. This collaboration of academic and non-academic knowledge systems constitutes a transdisciplinary approach that will advance not only understanding of the fundamentals of arctic resilience but also spur action, inform decision-making, and translate into solutions for resilience. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The Marine Arctic Resilience, Adaptations and Transformations (MARAT) project will focus on Arctic marine food webs, which are changing at unprecedented rates to understand how species will adapt, how new ecological configurations will emerge, and how communities dependent on marine resources will cope with change. This project will integrate models, local knowledge, and comparative case studies to assess the resilience of Arctic marine food webs to climate and fishing pressures, and how communities adapt or transform to such changes. The project will use methods and theories from the natural and social sciences, as well as integrating perspectives from local communities, national governmental agencies and multilateral institutions all focused on sustainable fisheries. Specifically, the MARAT project will employ food web models, local ecological knowledge, and comparative case studies to evaluate the resilience of Arctic marine food webs to climate change and fishing pressures. The project will: 1) generate a generic Arctic marine food web model; 2) develop case studies focused on Arctic char in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada, and salmon in Alaska; 3) explore how Indigenous local and scientific knowledge inform fisheries co-management; and 4) develop tools to assess the adaptive capacities of Arctic communities relative to changes in marine environments. This project will expand previous efforts of the Arctic Resilience Report to upscale the resilience assessment of the Arctic by providing insights on how marine food webs are changing in the Arctic, and what opportunities and challenges they pose to governing agencies and local communities depending on marine ecosystem services. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.