Since the early 1970s, the negative impacts of small aircraft activity on local wildlife and subsistence hunting have been an ongoing concern expressed by rural communities in Arctic Alaska. More specifically, these communities have expressed concern that aircraft activity from industry, commercial (sport) hunting, research, and tourism is disturbing caribou by altering their behavior and movement and, for rural communities who rely on the subsistence hunting of caribou for food and resources, this change in behavior has reduced hunting opportunities. Residents of rural communities and agencies who manage human-wildlife interactions have requested more involvement of local stakeholder groups in the process addressing and resolving this conflict.
The development of a resolution of these conflicts can be accelerated using structured decision making (SDM). SDM starts the decision-making process with stakeholder preferences and ensures stakeholder values guide the decision process. This project will apply an SDM approach to engage key stakeholders within the Western Arctic Parklands and Noatak National Preserve, where the focus of the human-caribou-aircraft conflict is, in a series of facilitated SDM workshops. These workshops will inform a localized management plan and identify options that can advance knowledge on the human-wildlife conflict.
The value-focused approach of SDM ensures that existing observations on conflicts between small aircraft activity and subsistence hunting are developed into data products that directly link to the concerns of community members. It will also provide a critical framework for assessing how these communities may ultimately adapt to future changes in aircraft activity and other associated changes. If effective, this approach has wide applications to other regions and systems experiencing similar human-wildlife and resource dilemmas.
