Rivers are the lifeblood of Arctic Indigenous communities.  Arctic rivers provide cultural, spiritual, and nutritional sustenance in the form of fishing and transportation to other subsistence resources, family, and friends via boats in the summer and over ice in the winter. Increasing temperatures are changing snowmelt, river flow, and ice patterns, disrupting aquatic ecosystems and transportation corridors communities rely on. USGS researchers from the Southwest CASC (Nicole Herman-Mercer), Alaska CASC (Ryan Toohey), and Alaska Science Center (Michael Carey and Joshua Koch), along with partners from the University of Colorado, Boulder and National Center for Atmospheric Research are working to understand the impacts of these changes on Arctic ecosystems and communities by weaving together Indigenous knowledges and methods from western science. The Arctic Rivers Project, recently highlighted in Eos, began in 2020 and is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic Program. 

A recent project publication in AGU Advances was also featured in AGU’s Eos Research Spotlight. This publication outlines a framework for co-designing earth system models with the model’s intended users, based on the Arctic Rivers Project and another case study based on work with the Klamath Tribe that the USGS was not involved in. In the Arctic Rivers Project researchers developed high-resolution climate and hydrology data sets for Alaska with guidance from an Indigenous Advisory Council, responses to a climate information survey from local decision makers across Alaska and the Yukon Territory, and feedback from attendees at a project sponsored meeting, the Arctic Rivers Summit. Co-designing models increases the potential for model use by end-users and fosters two-way learning between users, who better understand the models and outputs, and modelers, who gain insights into local processes and priorities.  

Learn more about the Arctic Rivers Project in this USGS Geonarrative.