The Arctic's size and extreme and remote environment make it a challenging place to monitor environmental change.  Fortunately, the Arctic is home to many communities who maintain strong ties to the land - through long-held traditional practices such as harvesting and berry collecting to recreational pursuits to spiritual practices and customs.  These residents, who are present throughout all seasons, offer an opportunity to both detect change and offer insights into this change - whether it's part of a natural cycle or in response to new pressures. 

Arctic residents, in particular Indigenous peoples, offer an opportunity to improve our monitoring coverage and our understanding of environmental change - whether as 'human sensors' practicing citizen science methods, or through other innovative community-based monitoring techniques, such as employing resident survey methods to track change on an annual basis or through documenting and analyzing oral history to provide a longer-term perspective on changes in Arctic ecosystems.

This version of the CBMP's e-newsletter is dedicated to highlighting existing community-based monitoring programs in effect across the Arctic.  The Arctic, through the strength of its residents, is a global leader in community-based monitoring and some of the program's highlighted in this newsletter are testament to that. 

This spring's e-newsletter also offers us an opportunity to highlight the launch of the CBMP's Community-based Monitoring Handbook.  The Handbook was created to serve as a guide for scientists, community-members, students, government officials and others on principles to consider when establishing a community-based monitoring program.  The approaches and concepts presented in the Handbook were developed as a result of surveys of eight existing community-based monitoring programs in the Arctic, including one from Australia.

Enjoy the Newsletter!

 
Sincerely,   

Mike Gill, Chair
Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program

The River Teno is a large border river between northernmost Finland and Norway, where joint research and monitoring programs on Atlantic salmon are based on bilateral agreements. Monitoring programs form the basis for bilateral management of this valuable natural resource, which is important for the indigenous Sami people and their culture in the area. The long-term monitoring program for Atlantic salmon populations of the Teno system combine traditional, local knowledge and modern scientific tools.

Salmon catch statistics form a corner stone of the monitoring, comprising information from a variety of fisheries, both traditional and recreational, and from different parts of the large system. Local fishers are an essential source of information on their catches through systematic collection of catch reports. Another central data source is catch samples, collected from all fisheries, totaling thousands of adult salmon scale samples annually. This network of c.80 trained local fishermen is spread throughout the river system, in both countries. Their role in providing invaluable biological material for e.g. age determination, genetic and stable isotope analyses is crucial in enabling such massive data collection in the long term, currently c. 40 years. As the modern research tools in genetics and other molecular methods evolve, the long-term tissue archive has ever increasing value.

Maija Länsman¹, Jaakko Erkinaro¹, Eero Niemelä¹, Bente Christiansen²

¹Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, Utsjoki, Finland

September 2010

Article 12.7.6 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) in Canada requires that government and the Nunavut Planning Commission cooperate to develop and implement a plan for monitoring the current and cumulative long-term environmental impacts of development in Nunavut. This plan is referred to as the Nunavut General Monitoring Plan (NGMP).

NGMP will provide for the collection, analysis and dissemination of information regarding the state and health of the eco-systemic and socio-economic environment in the Nunavut Settlement Area.  NGMP will contribute towards the establishment of baseline data and the continued collection of data required to monitor environmental changes over time.

NGMP is a partnership governed by the NGMP Steering Committee which is composed of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), the Government of Nunavut (GN), the Nunavut Planning Commission (NPC) and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada/Government of Canada (INAC/GoC). The NGMP Steering Committee is supported by the NGMP Secretariat.  The NGMP Secretariat is currently being established.

The NGMP governance structure also includes a Partner Advisory Group and Expert Advisory Teams.    

The collection of information for NGMP will be driven by a set of key questions and priorities. The NGMP Steering Committee will develop the key questions in consultation with their constituencies, the Partner Advisory Group, and Expert Advisory Teams.

For further information, please contact:

Seth J. Reinhart

Manager, Nunavut General Monitoring Plan

NGMP Secretariat

Iqaluit, Nunavut

Email: Seth Reinhart Email

Tel: 867-975-4667

Fax: 867-9754585

Back to top.

 Ecology of Ringed Seals in Hudson Bay and Foxe Basin

During the last 40 years, the Hudson Bay ecosystem has experienced major climatic changes that have affected ice-dependent Arctic species.  

Because of their position near the top of the Arctic food web and their dependence on sea-ice for reproduction and survival, ringed seals (Phoca hispida) are expected to be good indicators of ecosystem change under current and predicted climatic trends, particularly in Hudson Bay where they occur near the southern limit of their range.    

Since 2003, we have been working with communities around Hudson Bay, Arviat and Sanikiluaq in particular, in organizing local collections of tissue samples from seals hunted for subsistence. Dedicated collectors work with hunters to provide samples used to assess reproduction, survival, and health of seals and track ecosystem changes. In addition, we have deployed satellite tracking instruments on 50+ ringed seals in Hudson Bay since 2006, and were able to follow their movements and diving behaviour.

This work allowed us to identify important areas that ringed seals rely on for their foraging and travelling activities, as well as to understand how they perform these activities in Hudson Bay. Help and knowledge from Inuit from the local communities of Sanikiluaq (Belcher Islands), Arviat (western Hudson Bay), and Igloolik (Foxe Basin) have been crucial for this project. As a result of our ongoing collaboration, Inuit from Sanikiluaq are now able to conduct field work operations independently, and have been doing so for the last two years. We look forward to building upon our community relationships to improve monitoring of the Hudson Bay ecosystem.    

For more information visit: Ringed Seal Project in Hudson Bay and Foxe Basin