Dispatches from the front lines of climate change …
This week, the second of our two-part series on the network of observers in remote areas around Alaska and western Canada who provide information about potential emerging health threats in those areas – many related to climate change.
“What we’re really relying on here is local knowledge – and sometimes, traditional knowledge,” says Mike Brubaker, referring to the kinds of information posted to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s Local Environmental Observer, or LEO, Network.
Brubaker – who’s headed up the citizen science-driven project – says it’s become an important source of data collected by its 120 members, who come from diverse backgrounds.
“Sometimes they’re hunters. Sometimes they’re environmental or natural-resource managers, commercial fishermen, pilots, people who work in forestry, people who work in a hatchery,” he said.
Brubaker, who directs the Consortium’s Center for Climate and Health, says the observers provide firsthand data on environmental anomalies in their areas. Like the unusual parasites that Victoria Kotongan says she found in grouse and ptarmigan she’d harvested near her western Alaska community.
“I asked other hunters in town they’d seen anything like that. And they hadn’t,” she said.
Kotongan is an environmental specialist with Unalakleet’s tribal council. She says she posted the observation because she didn’t know whether she should eat the fowl.
Brubaker says he referred her to a wildlife toxicology expert with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, who in turn conferred with experts with Colorado State University’s Veterinary Wildlife Laboratory.
“And it resulted in a (research) paper, because it was the furthest north that that type of parasite had ever been documented,” he said.
Brubaker says that’s one of more than 350 observations posted to the LEO Network website since it was launched nearly four years ago. And it’s the sort of data needed to monitoring changes that affect wildlife that are essential for residents’ food security.
“We see that the role of the environment in achieving healthy communities is getting more complex, and probably more important than it has been in the past,” he said.
Brubaker says the project has been so successful that the eight-nation Arctic Council has adopted it as the model for an international circumpolar environmental-observer network.
Editor's note: This online version of this story has been revised.
