Local partnerships build understanding of ocean dynamics in Southeast Alaska
With over 30,000 km of shoreline, Alaska is home to some of the world’s richest fisheries. In Southeast Alaska, like much of the state, coastal communities depend on commercial and subsistence fisheries for their livelihood. With such a vast and varied environment, obtaining long-term oceanographic data is challenging, limiting understanding of patterns and the ability to predict long-term change in habitat and distribution of vital Alaskan fish populations.
As a part of the Southeast Alaska Ocean Trolling Vessel Measurement Program facilitated by Alaska Sea Grant, University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Dana Bloch has been working to overcome this challenge.
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University of Alaska gets $20M to study effects of climate change on fishing and harvesting in the Gulf of Alaska
A new University of Alaska research project will look at how human-caused climate change affects fishing, farming and harvesting in the Gulf of Alaska to build resilience for communities that rely on the ocean.
$20 million dollars of funding from the National Science Foundation will support the work of 23 researchers at all three University of Alaska campuses in Fairbanks, Juneau and Anchorage.
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Federally funded project will look for rare earth elements in seaweed
The Southeast Alaska project will launch in March with collection and analysis of various types of seaweed around the southern end of Prince of Wales Island. The project is trying to determine whether significant amounts of rare earth elements are being absorbed by that seaweed from Bokan Mountain, which is known to contain several of those minerals.
Beyond that, the project will examine the possibilities for cultivating enough seaweed to make it worthwhile to extract those absorbed critical elements, said the project’s lead researcher, UAF’s Schery Umanzor.
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