ENRI members present significant discoveries at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco Dec. 13-17

Faculty and graduate students from the University of Alaska Anchorage Environment and Natural Resources Institute (ENRI) and the Biology Department, in cooperation with colleagues from across the United States, are presenting their scientific discoveries in 14 presentations this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, CA.

Master's students Beth Sharpe, Andy Anderson, Lisa Ebbs and Ashley Stanek; Ph.D. student Ken Tape; and postdoctoral fellows Adam Cszank and Jessica Cable will share their findings from Alaska and other regions of the arctic. These and the other collaborative presentations will report discoveries that change our vision of how arctic and sub-arctic systems function.

The most important discoveries that ENRI will report are:

• Wolves in southwestern Alaska are consuming both moose and salmon;
• Warmer and wetter high arctic conditions will increase carbon sequestration by tundra in northwest Greenland (carbon sequestration is the process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it in a reservoir);
• Shrub increases across northern Alaska increases carbon sequestration and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values but not in a linear fashion;
• Increasing shrubbery in Alaska river channels and gullies is reducing landscape erosion and lake sedimentation;
• Permafrost thaw is changing soil mixing in Alaska tundra and releasing ancient carbon dioxide to the modern atmosphere, based on a long-term ENRI experiment;
• Winter precipitation shifts in Alaska will result in greater tundra plant use of snow melt water and will stimulate carbon sequestration;
• Permafrost thaw in the Alaska boreal and tundra regions will result in a new water source for plants;
• Water sources of the Mat-Su rivers and streams is based on a mixture of ground, snow melt and rainfall.

A list of the papers being presented at AGU can be found on the ENRI website.