A co-production of knowledge approach to understand how sea ice loss constrains Indigenous hunting opportunities for traditional marine mammal resources in northwest Alaska

Abstract:

Dramatic loss of sea ice is rapidly transforming coupled human-nature marine ecosystems across many Arctic regions. Marine mammals are integral to these ecosystems, including for the coastal Indigenous people across the Arctic who maintain traditional harvests of ice-dependent species as nutritional, cultural, and spiritual aspects of their way of life. Although changing Arctic marine ecosystems are widely predicted to affect the accessibility and availability of traditional marine resources, direct impacts to communities have largely remained unquantified by scientists and unrecognized by policy-makers. To assess the shifting phenology of annual ugruk (bearded seal, Erignathus barbatus) harvests in northwest Alaska, we applied a co-production of knowledge approach in which we combined a unique time-series of hunting records with the environmental predictors identified as most relevant through Indigenous Knowledge, specifically a historical sea ice atlas and remotely-sensed sea ice data. We show that the duration of spring subsistence hunts for ugruk by the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut people in northwest Alaska declined significantly during 2003-2019 due to a shift (~3 weeks earlier) in the timing of regional sea ice breakup. While the start date of the hunting period has not changed significantly, the end date now trends ~26 days earlier than it did in the past decade. We consider how hunters have, so far, compensated in effort to offset the decrease in harvesting period and related loss of sea ice habitat for ugruk. Ultimately, climate change is constraining Qikiqtaġruŋmiut hunters into shorter windows of hunting opportunities, which more broadly has the potential to threaten the persistence of the Indigenous way of life across Arctic communities.