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NOAA whale project raises some hackles North Slope Natives say they need an involvement in defining “biologically important areas” in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The question of how to meld the perspectives of western science and traditional Native knowledge when addressing environmental issues in the Arctic offshore of northern Alaska is a perennial topic of discussion at the Arctic Open Water Meeting which NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS, organizes each year. During this year’s meeting the question of traditional knowledge use came to the fore once again when, on March 6, NMFS presented some preliminary results from an exercise to develop what it terms “biologically important areas” for three species of whale found in the Alaska Arctic.
The objective of the meetings is to bring together the various stakeholders in the Arctic offshore, including government regulators, oil industry officials and people from the North Slope communities, to review industrial activities in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas during summer Arctic open-water seasons. But, as an adjunct to NMFS’ annual exercise of processing authorizations to industry for the minor, unintended disturbance of marine mammals, the meetings also provide opportunities to discuss approaches to marine mammal protection.
Maps In explaining the biologically important areas concept, Megan Ferguson, a research fisheries biologist in the National Marine Mammals Laboratory, said that a working group, a part of a NOAA program to investigate human impacts on marine mammals, had developed a draft suite of maps depicting whale feeding areas, breeding areas and migration corridors, based on data gleaned from scientific literature; published or unpublished scientific data; and expert knowledge. Information used included data about whale sightings, whale tagging data, genetics and historical whaling records, Ferguson said.
The working group that produced the maps consisted of 25 technical experts from NOAA, the U.S. Navy, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Park Service, academia and three environmental consultancies, Ferguson said. And as a starting point regional experts took their “best stab at drawing polygons on a map” to define the whale habitat areas, she said.
Whale feeding areas include the Barrow Canyon in the extreme northeast of the Chukchi Sea, where the animals tend to congregate every year, and a broader region encompassing much of the Alaska Beaufort Sea, a region that includes a series of more transient feeding areas, used by the whales in some years but not in others, Ferguson said.
Draft product The idea is to deliver a draft product, as a starting point, and to then invite comment and critique of the product, to enable the eventual development of something that can “be useful for trying to understand the effects of human activities on these animals,” Ferguson said. NOAA is publishing the maps and accompanying information on its website at cetsound.noaa.gov as a means of gleaning public comments. Ferguson also said that she had been in contact with the North Slope Borough, in part to determine how to incorporate traditional Native knowledge into the product.
“I don’t know what is the most effective way to get that traditional knowledge into this information, and I’m very interested in figuring out how to do that,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson also commented that one goal of the mapping initiative is to produce a tool that can be used in the management of the offshore.
“Ideally we want these tools to be applied to NOAA decision making,” she said.
Community concerns A number of people from North Slope communities who were scattered among the audience in the packed meeting room in the Egan Center in Anchorage remained silent during the talk, but lined up to comment during the ensuing question and answer session.
One resident, clearly frustrated at what he saw as an absence of traditional knowledge in the NOAA analysis, remarked on the apparent absence of anyone from the North Slope communities in the NOAA working group.
“Why is that?” he asked. “Get somebody on board and we’ll be able to help you guys along.”
Patsy Aamodt, a member of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, a Native tribal organization, said that she had been alarmed by what she had heard, especially given the statement about the possible use of the maps as a management tool.
“The perception that I get (is that) those of us from the Arctic are looked at as if we have no expertise, no experience and no credibility regarding our environment,” she said. “And it might be that we don’t have everything nicely written in black and white on a sheet of paper that we can provide as documentation of our expertise, but I would hope that the people who are doing the research will take seriously the comments that have been made by those of us who live in the Arctic year round, and the knowledge that we have that has been passed on from generation to generation.”
Ferguson re-iterated that the working group is contacting the North Slope Borough with a view to tapping into traditional knowledge.
Can be successful Rhonda Sparks, regional coordinator for the Alaska Nanuuq Commission, commented on the success that her commission has seen when incorporating traditional knowledge into a polar bear co-management plan that her commission was working on with Russia and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Traditional ecological knowledge is very important she said.
“We’re making management decisions based on it,” she said. “It complements western scientific studies. … There’s a solution.”
Understanding impacts During her talk, Ferguson said that the biologically important areas initiative had originated from a NOAA commitment in 2010 to take a multifaceted approach to try to understand the impacts of human activities on marine mammals. That commitment had taken shape in the form of working groups for the compilation of information and the creation of products that would help in the understanding of the spatial distribution of animal populations.
An understanding of marine mammal population distributions becomes particularly important to NMFS in assessing how many low-level whale “takes” — non-harmful disturbances — an industrial activity such as seismic surveying or drilling might cause. The estimated number of takes would be some product of the intensity of the sound that the activity transmits through the ocean waters, the sound duration and the densities of the animal populations.
But when a NOAA working group began investigating whale population distributions it realized that it would be necessary to consider the behavior of the whales, identifying areas where the animals tend to congregate at certain times of the year, Ferguson said. And that realization led to the initiative to identify biologically important areas, she said.
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