 Hi, sorry. I'm Andrew Turner. I'm the Director of Esri's Research and Development Center in Washington, D.C., and I'm also on the GSC. And we also welcome our online participants, although at this time I don't think we're going to introduce you. If you should have a question or comment later, please introduce yourself when you do that. And I'm going to turn this over to Mark Riker, who's going to moderate this session. Well, good afternoon. I hope everybody had a good lunch. And the Carbo Rush isn't going to dampen our questions this afternoon. I'd like to introduce a topic mapping the new Arctic. I think we all understand the conditions today are very different in the Arctic than they were just a few years ago. And the implications and opportunities exist on the economic, environmental, and social fronts. There are a range of different issues and opportunities that I think are very much of worth examination today or of importance in terms of the way we go forward with science. We have several participants today who will be contributing. Michael Tischler from USGS will be giving us a keynote. I'll do an intro for him in a second. And then we have a number of panelists, so Rachel Bernstein and Mac. Mac is okay, right? Mac Ratisse from NGA Research. Nicole Kinsman from NOAA. And Michael Brady, cartographer from NGA. Thank you, sir, for your service. Hello, cartographer. I'll introduce our panelists last, but I think right now I'll introduce Dr. Tischler. I've known Michael for a long time. And we've probably met more often in these environments than elsewhere. But he's a director of the National Geospatial Program at US Geological Survey. He has management oversight of the National Geospatial Program, including the National Map, Technical Ops, 3DEP, the 3D Elevation Program, and as well as research activities performed at the Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information, and a requirement and mandate for national disaster response. He's also got a background in the US Army Corps of Engineers, so I can't think of anybody better to lead off this discussion. But, you know, we did have a project recently, a pilot in the Arctic, and I think your presence and reflection on that, and way forward, it's going to be very informative for the groups. Michael, over to you. Very interesting topic. I do want to at least acknowledge Kevin Gallagher. He's the Associate Director for Core Science Systems at USGS. Some of you may know him. He's been very involved in the Arctic Special Data Infrastructure Program I'll be talking about, as well as Alaska Mapping. He would really like to be here, but it's unfortunately a schedule didn't allow it for today. These are very, very interesting and important topics, and I've been at USGS for about four or five years, and I've been able to see them develop, and especially the Arctic, excuse me, the Alaska Mapping portion has been very valuable and very rewarding to see progress on throughout the last few years. USGS has, of course, a mapping mission that dates back to the start of USGS more than 130 years ago, and that sits today in governance structures and in some of the technical products and services we put out. It involves us in governance boards and structures across the world and domestically within the US, and we serve as a national mapping agency for the United States domestically. Outside of that, we have our colleagues at NGA, but if you're dealing with domestic issues and domestic mapping, the USGS is a lead agency for that, and we coordinate amongst the federal family, along with states and local governments, to be able to support that mission. So I'm going to talk today about the Arctic and some of the efforts of the USGS have led within the Arctic in the past few years, why it's important, and a bit about where we're going in the future. I think for this room, these are probably known issues. The Arctic is changing dramatically, and ice and permafrost are melting, and that has a lot of impacts on infrastructure, let alone populations. More people are being active in the Arctic, and they've been able to mitigate the environment up there. There's more development for natural resources, for oil and petroleum. There are shipping lanes that are opening up, so there's just a lot more activity in general. The coastlines are changing in a variety of ways. The natural resources that are in greater demand, we've seen just within the USGS within the past few years more of a focus on critical mineral extraction and identifying where there's more critical minerals. Alaska is a big part of their state's natural resources. They're intimately involved in that, and that stretches across the Arctic. It's not just Alaska. The other opportunity is that mapping technologies are increasing, whether it's from fixed wing or from satellite observations, or even the processing technology. What you can do with the data that's getting better is just as good as the data itself, which is getting better. There are two particular efforts I'm going to talk about today, the Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure, which is a collaborative effort loosely organized and connected with the Arctic Council that connected geospatial offerings from eight different Arctic countries that make up the Arctic Council, United States, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Denmark, as well as the Alaska specific mapping objectives that the USGS led with other federal partners to really enhance and modernize the geospatial foundation for Alaska, which was woefully at a date. I want to preface this both with a kind of a reminder of just how difficult it is to operate in this environment both technically and physically. The internet connectivity is a dill environment. It's disconnected intermittent and limited bandwidth. So when you're transferring data, you've got to think about that. The road access is difficult to say the least. And that extends to the air traffic that you've a lot of Alaska gets around by personal aviation and the conditions are not always conducive to operating or making a collection when you want. That means the plane's got a lot of downtime. That means there's a lot of cloud cover that might interrupt satellite observations. A lot of things you've got to think about there. It's an enormous state. You know, you often see it on on high school or elementary school maps and it's tucked away somewhere near Hawaii. You don't often think about the actual size of Alaska relative to the domestic United States. Some of the advocates for Alaska and their congressional delegation are very fond of saying that if you cut Alaska in half, Texas is still the third largest state. I mentioned the weather. It's difficult to operate on our on for humans. It's also difficult for technology and battery life. Just a difficult environment, which makes it all the more challenging for geographers and cartographers. But we rise to those challenges, right? Another way of looking at this, this is borrowed from a colleague of ours at Dewberry, Dave Mountie. He's been around the block for a number of years. I'm sure some of you have run into him and worked with him. Fantastic gentleman. He's helped the USGS and a lot of our federal partners in our approach and strategy to mapping the Arctic and our contributions in Alaska. It's it's a largest area of any state. There's a number of UTM zones, long distances, enormous mountains. All these things make it really, really hard to work. And I'll, this has more. This is a focus on Alaska. But I think these issues are issues are systemic across the Arctic. All of the countries have the same issues to deal with. It just makes it a more difficult and challenging environment to operate in. But because it's so strategically important, because there's more of a focus on there now, we got to figure out how to deal with these challenges and overcome them. The Arctic spatial data infrastructure allows it's a it's a construct that allows sharing geospatial data in an efficient and flexible way. I mentioned that this was a collaboration of eight countries that came to develop this SDI for the Arctic. And because they recognize that the geospatial geospatial foundation for the Arctic underpins a tremendous amount of applications for all of the countries and they all benefit by contributing and putting all their information on a common framework. The development, as I mentioned, is facilitated by these countries and the national mapping agencies within each country. And the governance structure for that is becoming quite good and quite strong. It follows the same leadership as the Arctic Council. So when the US has leadership of the Arctic Council, the US has leadership of the Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure Group. That happened about four or five years ago, I think, my I mentioned Kevin Gallagher, he became the chair of the Arctic SDI and he really took the bull by the horns and made a lot of progress and how we collect and present geospatial information across the Arctic working with these eight partners. This was had previously endorsed by the Arctic Council. We have an MOU in three languages. The senior Arctic officials, which is an official designation, recognize this and the value of this, which is really great. So there is some codification behind this. It's not just people getting in a room. There's some international governance and structure behind what this is, and some accountability to higher boards like the Arctic Council and CAF. The SDI is focused on working with organizations to make their data available. That's a big part of it, is getting the data out there and making sure that it's accessible to everybody in a way that it can be used and it's interoperable. And it's built toward the requirements of the stakeholders. In this case, it's the Arctic Council and those member countries. And that we follow best practices for information management, like looking at the life cycle of geospatial data and maintenance and metadata and making sure that it's not just something that's going to be out there for a year and then die, that this is something that has to be maintained and that you continue to contribute to it. And Mark will be happy to hear it's built on open data standards. You can't do something like this amongst eight countries unless you have standards and unless you agree to those types of practices going into it. And that was a big part of what this spatial data infrastructure was about. A big development in the last few years of the Arctic spatial data infrastructure was portal, a place to go and retrieve a lot of the information. And that's a part of what I wanted to bring this discussion today to folks was to raise awareness of the Arctic SDI geoportal and the data and the same thing in Alaska. So you all are aware of the data that's out there. Sometimes the government is not so good about promoting the large amounts of effort and time that we put into things. So I wanted to make folks aware of that there is a portal out here that we can find data that's been that's authoritative from these countries, which I think is really important. You can do location searches, search through the catalog by metadata. There's a few other things I'll walk you through here. And it's even available. The data is available in multiple languages and in different projections, depending on from which country you're accessing. It begins with a topographic base map and that is the one of 24 K maps delivered by the National Mapping Agencies of each country. If I remember right, this the portal itself is hosted by Finland, but it's really the contributing effort of all the National Mapping Agencies. We've given our data, just so happens that Finland is the one that's hosting the data and responsible for that particular geoportal right now. But the USGS, we gave our Alaska maps. That's our contribution to the Arctic, all the other countries did as well. It's integrated with the International Pathometric Chart of the Arctic Ocean. There is an API available and you'll see an elevation layer on here I'll get to in just a minute that came from the Polar Geospatial Center and their development of the Arctic DEM, which I'm sure some of you are aware of. There's a gazetteer which links to the authoritative names databases from multiple countries within the US. That's a geographic names information system that allows people to be able to search and find locations in the Arctic, which from what I gather was not something that was available prior to this kind of an SDI. So that's another important, a definite important development. There's more than 3 million place names and includes land and marine features both. We had a preface discussion with the presenters and I believe none of us could determine what Gebco or scuffin or arms-to-veg stood for. No, somebody knew. But I certainly was unaware. Anybody on the panel remember that what they were? Okay, yeah, yeah. We have a great panel today. Thank you for that. They were new to me, I will say, except for GNIS. At interesting development too, you always want to look at the data like you're used to looking at it. So this particular portal has the ability to re-project the data. If you're coming from Russia, if you're coming from Iceland or Finland, you can project the data to whatever is suitable for your own country and in a way that it's more familiar to you. Some of the applications, we mentioned that I mentioned that this is meant to be something that's maintained and sustainable. As you develop new data and as you are developing new projects, you can contribute to this. The countries can contribute. One area was the wetlands project that the Arctic Council, the conservation for Arctic Floor and Fauna Group supported was this wetlands project and that was an Arctic SDI collaboration to map wetlands across the Arctic, which I believe shows up on this geoportal now too. Of course, wetlands are important everywhere, doubly important in the Arctic. Elevation model for this portal was another significant development. It just so happened I mentioned that there was new mapping techniques that were available. One of them was applied to the Arctic. Paul Marin, the director of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota had taken some code, open source code, and applied it to the Digital Globe satellite archive to come up with a structure for motion from satellite-based imagery solution to create an elevation model across the entire Arctic. Back by high-performance computing, he was able to come, I think he's on the second or third version now, but where there was no elevation data before, he was able to create a consistent elevation base. It was really, really remarkable and it was highly automated and developed very, very fast. And this was a great offering to these countries that either don't have the capacity or the means or it's just too difficult to go collect elevation data there personally. They were able to leverage what the Polar Geospatial Center has done. And the PGC ended up being a key contributor to this STI on behalf of the U.S. Really tremendous data set and allowed for a lot of capacity development among CA countries. The efforts are continuing. Another interesting spawn of this was that the countries are not making that elevation data set better by adding ground control points and allowing to redevelop that and reprocess it. The errors can be tightened, which is a really great thing to see. And it gave the countries a chance to contribute to this too. The Arctic STI mapping team proposed a generation two PanArctic DEM at the Arctic STI Boarding Board just recently. And there's a number of other proposed actions which will continue to enhance the Arctic STI and its offerings to the eight Arctic countries. Give me a minute just to read those. So in summary, the Arctic STI it really improved access to geospatial data that allowed for a number of applications across the Arctic. It was a really great way to show collaboration between international partners that all had a common interest in the Arctic and bettering our information there. This is a very easy group to tell how important common geospatial data infrastructures and frameworks are. I'm sure you can all see those benefits, but this was at a very high level a really good demonstration of that. The geoportal itself allowed for embedded maps, time series visualization, and was just a really, really great way to represent all of the contributions from the countries that participated. This cartoon actually I think was developed by the Arctic STI. And so thanks to STI we now have an interoperable solution to address shared environmental, social, and economic challenges. So I know the USGS is very proud of what we've done and if Kevin were here he would carry that forward with the representation from all of the countries. It was a really great effort. A little closer to home I wanted to talk about what we've been doing in Alaska specifically. Alaska, a lot of the mapping efforts contributed to the US contribution to Arctic spatial data infrastructure. But it's a really good story about good governance and just really modernizing a state that really needed good geospatial information. In 2012 the Alaska Mapping Executive Committee was formed in response to a request from the Alaska Congressional Delegation to update the mapping information in the state. The topographic maps and a lot of the other underlying data dated from the 60s. It was taken from ortho imagery so sometimes the base was not very good. It wasn't the ortho imagery you would get today. It was quite old. In Alaska with a rather new landscape like that rivers move all the time. So the hydrography was off. The elevations were off. There was just a dramatic need to increase the accuracy and the resolution of the data that was there. 15 United States agencies and the state of Alaska were represented in this round table or in the AMAC. And that's goal was to ensure that Alaska's basic mapping themes met the standards that the rest of the United States were doing. I didn't think that was too tall of a request. Given it there. The first and second largest state that they should have the same standards that all the other states enjoy. The Inoske mapping executive committee set statewide mapping goals for a number of approved mapping themes. And the agencies a collection of them were able to pull funding and contribute to these and the states as well. The state of Alaska was contributed quite a bit too. To funding efforts to collect data in some cases or process data in other cases to bring up the entire geospatial foundation. And in many cases just the advocacy from the state agencies was really good too. Speaking of the state legislature or speaking with the public or raising awareness of the issue to justify why it was such a good effort that USGS was leading. The five main themes that we focused on for the first maybe six, seven years are here elevation, terrestrial hydrography, transportation, shorelines in grab D. You'll notice that there are leads that came from different agencies. Much like the Arctic SDI, this was a group effort. It's not something one agency could have done themselves. USGS, my agency had a lead for the elevation and for the terrestrial hydrography. A state of Alaska transportation and NOAA led the shoreline mapping in grab D. This started a little bit. It was a good question. How do you map Alaska? Given all the challenges that we discussed, what's the right instrument? What's the right plan? How do you go about doing this? We partnered with a company called Dewberry to help us think through that process. And what they came out with their recommendation was that radar technology, unlike LiDAR in the domestic U.S. and lower 48, radar was a better technology. The resolution wasn't quite as good as LiDAR. It's more about a five meter product as opposed to a one meter product you get from LiDAR. But it was able to see through cloud cover. And for most of the applications, one meter might have been a bit overkill. And the cost was certainly more advantageous going with radar. So for those reasons, and a few other ones, Dewberry as part of their assessment had suggested that we investigate using radar to do the mapping, the elevation mapping. So that's what we did. It's a technology called IFSAR, synthetic aperture radar. I'm sure a number of you are familiar with that. And it was really advantageous because it penetrates clouds and it really had a wide swath. So we were able to cover large areas of ground unlike fixed-wing LiDAR, which is very, very good, but doesn't have quite as wide a swath and was able to satisfy a number of different applications. And it was, like I said, it was more cost-effective for those, for the state. We worked with two different vendors. This was not a USGS aircraft. We don't have our own Air Force. Like with the lower 48, we rely on the private sector for their capacity to collect these kinds of data. We maintain the specs and we maintain the deliverable and we provide that out to the public. The contract provides three products, a train model, a surface model, and the radar intensity image, which is very, very valuable for looking at break lines and water features and hydrography. So we now, I'm really, well, I don't want to spoil the fun. Hang on just a minute and I'll stomp my feet. But these are the three products that we got out of the IFSAR deliverables. A surface model included all the man-made features and buildings and trees and then a train model which scraped all those away and then the radar intensity image. In addition, as sort of a by-product, flying all over the state, we have a lot more radar reflectors and ground control points that are able to be used by other people, whether it's academics or other surveyors in the state. There's now some more geodetic control as a by-product of us collecting elevation data. Now here, this is what I was going to put stomp. I'm really proud to say that since this effort became, really started on mass in about 2013, we wrote the last task order for all of Alaska this summer. We're 100% complete with a collection. It's not all public yet, most of it is. But this is a good way to track what was available in 2005. It was just ANWR, I think is the area in blue. Is that right? NPRA. NPRA. Thank you. National Petroleum Reserve. And then we remapped that, actually, I think in 18 or 19 because it had gotten so old. But you can really see from about 2013 onward how we are able to cover much of the state. It was really, really tremendous to see this being painted blue and a great testament to not just the partners, but the vendors themselves to be able to have that much fortitude to be able to go through with this, operating in the environments that they did. So the last little bits, I think that's Kodiak Island and some of the Western Aleutians. Those were some of the big areas left, but we're really, really glad to say that the collection was done just this summer and hopefully that'll be released next year. Some of the the elevation corrections were dramatic. I mentioned that a lot of the elevation data prior to this collection was very old and dated from the 60s. Alaska, more than any other state relies on personal aircraft aviation for getting around. When you have mountains at the wrong place, at the wrong elevation, with cloud cover, that's a recipe for disaster. And this is a good example to the kind of data that was able to be corrected by this elevation update. And aviation, it was critical for aviation safety. That was one of the largest drivers for this elevation model to begin with was the impact it would have on small aircraft and being able to navigate and have a product either in the cockpit or as part of flight planning so that when people were caught in a scenario where they didn't know where they were, it was a much more reliable based on which to navigate. We'll talk about terrestrial hydrography. I was surprised to learn just how much of the nation's freshwater is locked up in Alaska. It is really, really tremendous. I haven't spent a lot of time in Alaska, so it was my opening to me. But mapping the surface water at the same kind of an accuracy standard as at lower 48 is another big, big push that needed to be done with Alaska. It's much more complex. The hydrography is not anything to map up there, but USGS is really undertaking that as well. We've estimated that there's about $18 million benefit annually from updating this data. That's probably underselling it. But we're working on creating a hydrography dataset that would replicate what you're used to seeing like the national water model but having it for Alaska. We've we have started on some basins and that's considered complete when you have the national hydrography dataset, the watershed boundary dataset, which is the catchments that feed into the river reach, and NHDPlus high resolution are all updated over the same geography. The NHDPlus high res incorporates it's 1 to 24 game mapping as opposed to 1 to 150, 1 to 150, excuse me. And we've also done harmonization across the Canadian border with hydrography data, both all across the top tier of the lower 48 as well as with Alaska. And that's a big part too, so we can understand the contributions to and from Alaska with respect to hydrography. So another priority was creating a new series of Alaska topographic maps. That's something that USGS sets our bread and butter for 30 years or more. That's what's something I'm proud to say that we've done and we'll be completing the next few years. There's a status where not quite 100% green but getting close. And now that we started finishing are some of the major themes like elevation. At a recent AMEC meeting we looked at what does the next generation look like? Where are we going to be mapping next? We're going to focus on completing trussural hydrography, completing the shoreline delineation mapping, completing grab D, updating the imagery next at 50 centimeter resolution and increasing the acquisition of coastal topography and bathymetry another really difficult challenge. And there's a number of other growth opportunities that are just as important but maybe not as priority as those top five. So thank you very much. It was really gratifying to see these programs grow. And that's a bit about what USGS and our international partners have been doing because we know this is such an important area. Thank you, Michael. It was great to get this deep background on the Arctic as well as the efforts going on in Alaska within the US context. And Mike, thank you for the acronym of mania explanation. I think we all suffer from acute acronym mania but we'll keep it on the QT. Okay. What I'd like to do now is to segue to the panelists and I think we have three separate talks and I believe Rachel and Mac you'll be speaking first. Rachel and Mac both have very interesting backgrounds. They're both from the NGA research office and collectively I'm amazed at the level of background and discipline that you have relative to this topic. Rachel has been dealing with the multidisciplinary research effects of complex systems that impact national security but I think what was really interesting here is that you specialize on impacts of environmental change to the polar region. So I think that's a definite pertinent topic for us today. And then Mac as a program manager in the research group the degree of technical background that you've got I really want to have coffee with you over everything from geospatial analysis to pattern recognition to deep neural network activity. It's just it's amazing. Again with focus and climate branch at NASA Langley as well. So I think just the combined expertise here and knowledge is going to be great. I'm going to turn it over to you to give some insight into the topic. Okay. Thank you. I'm Rachel. I'm going to be starting today. So thank you for the opening presentation. That was that was perfect. It really set the stage for what we're going to be talking about. And I'm actually going to mention a couple of the same topics that you mentioned because NGA and USGS work together. So we thought about what are the the things that we want to talk about today and we have to sum up what are the big themes for mapping the new Arctic. We came up with challenges from the surfaces in the Arctic and then also how we work together because there's so much that we need to do to be working across agencies working across academia and then also to commercial sector as well. So we are from NGA and since I think a lot of people don't know what NGA's mission is we thought we'd take a little bit of time and just quickly go over the mission and then we'll talk to you about how mapping the Arctic fits into NGA's mission space. Okay. So Mike mentioned that USGS is the responsibility for mapping mapping the United States. NGA's mission space falls outside of the United States. We support the Department of Defense and the intelligence community and the civil community by providing geospatial intelligence. Geospatial intelligence can sort of be defined as analyzing imagery, geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features on the earth and geographically reference activities. NGA also has a mission to produce, evaluate, and catalog what we call foundation data. That's foundation data is topographic, elevation, terrain, land cover or geodetic data. And that's that foundation data mission is where mapping the Arctic falls into. For NGA, you talked about all the data in the spatial data infrastructure, the Arctic spatial data infrastructure. This is a stat slide for all of NGA's data globally, but there is Arctic data within each one of these components. So we have over a billion features cataloged in hundreds of thousands of standard maps. On Air and Sea, we're collecting millions of hydrographic features and aeronautic elements. We're also collecting foundation data to represent human geography, where people are, where the names that they, the names of the locations that they use, and other non-physical features. And we collect gravity data to support positioning, the world geodetic system, and geoid models. And at the bottom you can see we also have historical data that has been classified and that's now available to the public. It could be accessed through the USGS's long-term archive, or the National Archives, or the Library of Congress. So I think that's a really important data set to bring up here, because we've been talking a lot about change in the Arctic, and that is not a widely used resource for people looking at previous conditions. So it's, because it's difficult to use, it's photographs taken by satellite and dropped in film canisters to Earth. So it's not like you're regularly using this kind of data and you have a way to bring it into your current processes. But I always like to bring that up when we're talking about the Arctic because it is, it is out there. So I also wanted to touch back to a comment that Sandra made earlier in her keynote in the previous session. She's talking about the issues of global data sets versus local data sets. And I think you were talking about it in terms of how when we have global data sets you're missing the local accuracy issue. So you could be smoothing over some of the local effects and you're compromising that by getting a global data set. Mostly NGA data is not global. It's mostly local because it's in high resolution. But you have the opposite impact which is if you're looking at something from a hemispheric scale or even a global scale you don't have that consistent coverage on a lot of our data sets. So that also makes it challenging to use for science. So some of the other issues is in the Arctic we talked about the challenge of rapidly changing solving and melting surfaces. How the coastlines are changing and the human landscape is changing. And this is the challenge is really similar to the earlier session on flooding because revisit rate becomes really important. And so the more times that you need to revisit an area you also need to so I think about revisit rate a lot of times because we're from NGA we're thinking about satellite revisit rate. But we also need ground control points and that requires fieldwork component and that all of these pieces are why partnerships are so important because we're not going to do all of these pieces ourselves. We need to work with the other partners for this. So we're going to talk today about three specific examples that we're giving for collaborations for mapping the Arctic. Mac is going to talk about glacier remote sensing and she'll go into more detail on that next. The graphic in the middle here is actually some work we were doing with the National Ice Center the U.S. National Ice Center has the mission for mapping sea ice snow and other environmental conditions for the United States. And so while NGA does not have the mission for mapping sea ice we can work with them to take their data and build new visualizations for how to look at this data. And then the image on the right I realize this is not the Arctic. This is the Antarctic dim example the same work that happened with polar geospatial center in University of Minnesota also was used to map a high resolution dim of Antarctica which was recently released. That was and if you already mentioned most of this but I just want to say that that is like a true example of one of our best collaborations I think because you had polar geospatial center running the research for it they were using university developed algorithms university high performance computing National Science Foundation was funding it NGA was helping with the access to the digital globe imagery and there were a number of other industries in Esri I'm sorry I almost forgot that one but a number of other academics and industry and US government agencies were involved in that and I'm going to turn this over to Mack to talk about glaciers. Yeah so we wanted to just we wanted to talk to you guys about a recent project that we've been leading with the Army Corps Cold Regions Engineering Research Laboratory that's another mouthful that we just recently participated in starting early August of this year and it's still running now so basically what we did is we participate in this expedition to Helheim Glacier which is depicted by that red dot on the map on the upper right hand side it's in the southeast part of Greenland and this glacier is very interesting because it's actually one of the largest outlet glaciers in Greenland that means that it's exposed to bedrock on both sides and we were particularly interested in this specific glacier because it currently houses several in situ measurements instruments like temperature, wind, humidity and we also have terrestrial lighter systems which are measuring the mass loss at this particular glacier and fun fact is a few people speculate that this glacier was responsible for sinking the Titanic so I mean I don't know how much evidence there is of this but that's what it's rumored so together with Corel what we did was we went at the site and we developed we designed and deployed these corner reflectors that are on their upper right hand is the photograph that you see there and also when Mike showed before in his slides I'm going to go a little bit into detail about these corner reflectors so what they do is that they light up like a Christmas tree in radar imagery and this is specifically helpful for calibrating radar imagery so that you can get accurate eye signatures across the image we developed four of them north on two on the northern side two on the southern side and you can see them there well one example is if you look at the red arrow in the upper right hand side and this glacier is about four kilometers across on average but it kind of it depends on the mass loss at the time also just to make note you don't just go and fly to Helheim Glacier you can't just like over there but so you have to take a flight to Reykjavik and then from Reykjavik you take a plane you take a plane to Kalusuk and from Kalusuk you either charter a boat or you charter helicopter to Tysilik and then from Tysilik there's one guy with a helicopter there he also happens to be the son of the gentleman who owns one of two hotels in the island there and then you get to charter yet another helicopter to get on top of the glacier because you can't just hike up there so it's quite an ordeal and one of the reasons why it's such a remote area and another fun fact is that Helheim Glacier is in this area in North mythology called the land of the dead which is pretty cool so talked about the calibration what I wanted to mention was that if anybody knew that during the two weeks in August of August of this year we had actually one of the largest heat waves in Helheim Glacier and we were lucky enough to get imagery over this time so we got to see some really interesting dynamics going on in the glacier and you can't really see it here with the worldview pan image but you can certainly see it in imagery like radar and you could see things like in Sentinel-1 or radar set 2 and be able to witness like these amazing structures and of course if you have RGB imagery with the worldview you can see things like really cool lakes and the crevasses that open and close during the days really so these high resolution features can be seen with imagery and we're very lucky to have these in situ measurements at the site so that we can correlate these measurements and I think that's about it. I realize we're running out of time so I'll go over the last slide or two very quickly. This is the other example that we mentioned working with the U.S. National Ice Center. The image on the left it comes directly from the U.S. National Ice Center. They provide information for vessels in the U.S. actually going through ice-covered waters and so they one of the ways that they produce this information is through a weekly hemispheric product and these polygons all represent up to three different types of ice so up to three different concentrations of ice and three different stages of development of ice so the stage of development is sort of a proxy for the thickness and the type and maybe the strength of the ice as well so one of the things we worked on with them is turning it into a like simple to read analytic. This is not means of like permission to go into the ice for different types of vessels but the examples on the right are for two different ice capable vessel types. Ice strength ice strength in the vessels in the same ice conditions green is go red is don't go and yellow is there's ice of land origin like icebergs and we don't know the thickness so this is something that's still research level that we're working on with the ice center but again it's not a it's not prescriptive do not just follow it to exactly into the green water with the green ice and then the last thing is we talked a little bit about some of the partnerships that we have now but these are the opportunities to work with NGA we have an academic research program we actually bring in scientists from outside to come work with us for up to five years cleared or unclear and then opportunities on our NGA on said bizops where you can look if you're from a commercial sector and so thank you we're looking forward to the questions from the panel thank you I think we'll hold the questions of a discussion period and move over to Nicole kinsman who is the acting deputy associate director for core science program at USGS and she's also Alaska's regional advisor with NOAA for the National Geodetic Survey a lot of background in this area and in the previous topic of floods so we're looking forward to your talk over to you all right thank you so much and thank you for the intro and thanks for the invitation to come and speak here today I'm having a little bit of an identity crisis because I I am acting as of this week over with the USGS so it's kind of them to come and let me talk to you and I will be talking a little bit about some of the NOAA content and contributions to the Alaska mapping executive committee as well so I'm a coastal geomorphologist by training and a geodesist by necessity and when I talk about how I became a geodesist and I tell you that story I think it really speaks to the story of geospatial data in the Arctic and how far we've come and how far we've come working together when I got up to Alaska over a decade ago and was working at the local level really where the rubber hits the tarmac when it comes to geospatial data and building things in Alaska I quickly realized I was not in CONUS anymore the basic geospatial data sets that you can reach out for and look for from public data sets were not available and if you want to do some sort of simple project it would require contracting a whole new data collection setting out all new ground control even getting right back down to the nitty gritty of figuring out what reference frame that control even had to be in because you're working off the map so with that I want to dive in and give you a little bit more sort of context I like to set the stage a little bit having my duty station up in Alaska since we have geographers here here's a geography quiz who can tell me where this is anyone know no guesses it is somewhere in Alaska so this is the Kobuk Valley National Park it's above the Arctic Circle and the reason I show you this picture is I like to remind people that the Arctic's not all tundra it's incredibly incredibly diverse we're talking about landscapes that mimic and our analogs for areas that we see all over much of the rest of the globe and I think that's really important to remind ourselves when we're talking about geospatial topics in the Arctic and just to give you this example from Alaska this is a sand dune national park north of the Arctic Circle it's 30 square miles I believe of dunes that you might see more likely in the Sahara and it's a relic of aeolian deposition from the last ice age so something to just sort of mix up your preconceptions about what the Arctic is and the Arctic is changing and we often think sort of about how that change is really encapsulated with a thawing permafrost but there's a lot of other dynamic things that are happening in the Arctic as well whether that be some of our tectonic activity or all the things that are changing with ecosystems as well as we start to see the trees move further north and then the beavers follow the trees and that starts to change the river systems and so we're seeing change at the landscape scale too so my background like I said is in coastal geomorphology so just to give you a little bit more of a sampling of some of the diversity of Alaska I wanted to take you on a quick field trip just really showcasing how we do have coastlines in Alaska that are very similar to coastlines you might see in other parts of the US so there's barrier island systems like you might see in the Carolinas unlythafied bluffs like you might find in California large deltaic systems like the Mississippi Delta this Yukon Cuscoquim Delta system in western Alaska is actually larger than the state of the whole complex is larger than the state of Louisiana and rocky cliffs that you might find somewhere like Hawaii where you have basaltic deposits along the coast so very very diverse area when we're talking about mapping in the Arctic we're talking about mapping something that's changing and we're talking about mapping something that's very very diverse and as was mentioned by the other panelists very expensive and difficult to get to so that really takes us back to my own personal story which is what I wanted to share with you a little bit today so what I'm showing you here is a photo from a flooding event that happened in Gullivan, Alaska back in 2011 and the reason I'm showing you this is that back in 2011 the ISSAR project that Mike was able to introduce all of you to that collected newer new high resolution data across the whole state had not been completed over this area yet so when we were looking at evaluating flood risk in Gullivan, Alaska back in 2011 when this event had occurred the best available DEM in the broader area was the two arc second net so you're looking at a 60 meter footprint product you go and pull that even if you have an elevation data set and a couple postage stamps elevation data sets that were collected using photogrammetry directly over the community that were also about a decade old you want to go and align that to make a flood map with forecasted water levels in the offshore but to do that you might typically use a tool like V-Datom to align the vertical reference frames however V-Datom doesn't exist in Alaska and one of the reasons for that is there are so few tide gauges so the entire northwest coast of Alaska has about the same number of tide gauges as the state of Delaware right so when we're talking about operating in an area with a dearth of information especially back in 2011 there really was not much to go on and that's really why I describe myself as a geodesist by necessity as someone who was tasked with working with local governments to develop and create coastal hazard products for local community assessments and for infrastructure projects we need to get right back to the bottom layer of things and figure out the geospatial framework that we needed to establish so that we could even bring together disparate data sets as we started to work with partners and with others to fill in all those data gaps that we have in the Arctic so the last thing I wanted to mention just in the short time that I had was to highlight some of the contributions to the Alaska Mapping Executive Committee that my home office has contributed and this is really bundled into three key areas the gravity surveys, NSRS modernization and shoreline mapping and rapid ortho imaging in Alaska the first thing national spatial reference system modernization you may think well who really cares if we redefine latitude, longitude and elevation if you're familiar with NAV83 and NAVD88 that's being replaced by a modernized system in 2022 and it's a big boon for the Arctic it really really is there's sort of three ways that I can highlight that the first is that the new system's geocentric is defined by relationships to a global and international ideal frame which means if you're working with satellite data and locally collected data with local control it's easier to align those data sets it also means that it's easier for UAS systems to interact with the built infrastructure so having that in a global shared context that's consistent is really really important the other thing is that the new national spatial reference system is time dependent and so the coordinates in the new system have latitude, longitude, elevation and height as far as time so by having that time component it makes it a lot easier to monitor things that are undergoing change at rapid scale so if you're looking at changing sea level trends or if you want to monitor subsidence due to ice loss this is something that's really important the last thing is that the modernized NSRS is primarily accessed via GPS technology if you're working in the Arctic and historically you wanted to get latitude and longitude or height established you had to find a passive control mark a benchmark or other control point finding that in really remote areas and carrying those control out into really remote areas is very expensive so GPS has enabled high quality, high accuracy positioning in really remote areas like in the Arctic and part of that is the creation of a gravimetric geomodel which improves the height component of those GPS accessed positions improving that height component is I'm going to talk about a little bit more because that's some of the gravity surveys that we're conducting but one of the other things that's wrapped up in that is that the height system is now defined in tandem with Canada and we're working to ensure that we actually have consistent height so if you're working in a water basin or doing some project along the border you no longer have two different vertical height systems so I know that's something that a lot of people in Alaska are excited about with modernized NSRS one of the things that Mike mentioned that NOAA has contributed to with regards to the partnership through the Alaska mapping executive committee is collection of gravity data over Alaska and this is actually a project that's happening across the whole U.S. but we started in Alaska because that is the part of the U.S. where there's the greatest gain from having those new gravity surveys conducted and building that new gravimetric model and the reason that we want a good geomodel is when we're accessing positions using GPS the GPS only gives you your position relative to an idealized frame it's not giving you a society relevant height so that water flows from the tall numbers to the low numbers and so we need a nice geomodel to be able to translate those GPS heights into heights that are of importance to the things that we do in our work I'm pleased to also announce I can stop my feet also NOAA completed the gravity surveys over the mainland portion of Alaska last year and we've been working really really closely with NGA in the last few years especially to develop the improved gravimetric geomodel that'll be used in the modernized NSRS and so the experimental geomodel that we have released now includes all of those gravity surveys that have been conducted with the exception of down around southwestern Alaska and then we're planning to collect the allusions in 2020 so a big step forward in terms of the vertical the vertical height system that we're able to use in Alaska and this is a combination of data that's coming in from ground gravity surveys airborne and satellite and the gravity projects the airborne component of that and the last thing I wanted to highlight was some of the work that NOAA has been doing with our remote sensing division for rapid semi oblique imaging this is a camera system we actually use quite a bit to support FEMA after emergency response but when it's not being used post hurricanes we try to bring it up to Alaska and image areas as pre-condition imaging of the coastline and the coastal conditions and one of the nice things about this system is because it's used for emergency response they can actually conduct very rapid collection so when there's a good weather window you can get out and collect a lot more than 20 percent of Alaska was able to be collected in less than two weeks last time we brought the plane up two years ago and this serves as pre-event oblique imagery for Arctic coastlines and it's geo-referenced and GIS ready the last thing mapping the New Arctic to talk about some of this is some of the work in Alaska that's ongoing with coastal mapping another theme that's emerging with the AMAC group the state of Alaska has been working together with all of the other members of the federal mapping committee with the Alaska mapping executive committee through the integrated ocean coastal mapping program at NOAA and the integrated interagency working group on ocean and coastal mapping to develop a prioritization and a strategy for mapping the coastal areas in Alaska this is the update of the refreshed imagery TOCO BATHY which is very difficult to get in Alaska and also update of the shoreline vector and they're just releasing the results from this prioritization survey in the last month and the report itself is coming out at the end of the year or early next year and it includes a prioritization that was completed by local and state agencies as well as all the federal partners and this will be used to inform the 3D nation survey which is a follow-on to a lot of the updates to a lot of the work that is going to guide future mapping activities at the USGS and with partners and with that I will say thank you for your time thank you last speaker is Michael Brady a cartographer yes with the National GIF Spatial Intelligence Agency Maritime Safety Unit I think your exposure to the polar regions in Alaska started with your graduate work PhD work correct and has proliferated throughout your career so I'm looking forward very much to your comments sir you have the floor great thank you okay so we're out of time thank you no I'll try to get through this quickly again Mike Brady with the National GIF Spatial Intelligence Agency I'm a cartographer but I'm not here to present on anything NGA affiliated I'm going to be stepping through my recent doctoral research where I worked with Alaska natives in the North Slope borough to co-produce a coastal risk geographic information system so I hope to spark a discussion here on the role of local Arctic communities in Arctic mapping and Arctic science more generally the sea ice is melting diminishing and permafrost is thawing this is exacerbating already a very rapid coastline change along Alaska's northern coastline where the erosion rates are among the highest in the world in some locations and so my research is not focused on understanding that the geophysical processes involved here I am interested in working with the local communities to understand the impacts on the people that live there and are feeling the effects so when we hear about coastline change in Alaska and the impacts we generally hear about the impacts to physical infrastructure within the villages such as impacts to roads, buildings, utilities and so forth but when you talk to local communities there you realize that that's not the whole story when you consider other locally important land uses such as subsistent hunting where they're really using the entire coastline you quickly realize that it's not just what's happening along the tiny stretches of coastline in the villages of course those impacts are extremely important but it's not the whole story it's not the the only impacts that are locally relevant so when I learned this I set out to systematically collect local voices along Alaska's northern coastline and communicate the impacts that I was hearing from the local voices by creating a geographic information in collaboration with the North Slope borough so during the process of this research the North Slope borough said that we would like to officially collaborate with you on this because we want to hear about the impacts that are happening on our coastline so this this is a select land use map of Alaska's North Slopes so we're in the top of Alaska the United States most northern and largest municipality the purpose of this map the takeaway is that land use extends far beyond village locations so the villages in this map are indeed represented by the black dots and I've shown the collective subsistence land use for all eight municipalities up there shown as green hash marks as you can see that land use extends across the entire vast coastline not just within the villages gold and brown areas are Alaska native cooperation lands these are used for profit they were established on the the Alaska Native Claims Act of 1971 and the one more land you saw point out is the the great boundary around the region this is the boundary for the Alaska Native controlled North Slope borough the borough was established in the early 70s by the New Piyak to tax oil and gas activity in the region this is a very resource rich region of the world most of the oil and gas projects are out of Fruto Bay which those that oil that product is transported to market via the Translaska Pipeline system now this borough allows the local communities to have access to extremely expensive physical municipal infrastructure and services so it's very important for for the locals and all of these these land uses are important for Alaska native self-determination so to collect local views of coastline change risks happening in the region I worked in three municipalities Wayne Wright Utkeovic and Coktovic something I'll point out here is the collective assistance land use extent shown in green covers the coastline of two important federal land use the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the right these stretches of coastline I wanted to make sure I had local knowledge along them because they're subject to important and complicated decisions land use decisions to balance subsistence and hydrocarbon development so this is a co-production model that I've developed for the study I'm going to briefly step through this it's going to be high level it consists of three collaborative steps the first step is to create verify the local risk so I collected all available data of assets including some subsistence camps and other asset data and I did community mapping workshops to collect the local knowledge and I integrated this asset data with a shoreline change susceptibility data model which is based on the US geological surveys recent shoreline change data product where every 50 meters they provide historical shoreline change and I added additional layers including shoreline type and I created a wind fetch model to show distance to minimum CS extent for the 2012 so I integrated these two data sets together I called it as exposure database and I worked with the local GIS team for the North Soap borrow to install that on the internal land use web mapping system that they used to support decision land use decisions in the context of large scale oil and gas development and once we had that on the internal web mapping system we engaged local land use managers to collect perceptions about usability to refine the tool and once that data was in the borough's hands it's up to them how they wanted to use it and disseminate it for the researcher my job is just to step through this process again incorporate all the feedback that I received and improve the GIS idea being through time you'll get a usable GIS that has decision impacts now when I present this work I usually focus on the results from the workshop but kind of a bigger picture aspect of this that I want to bring up here is that there's also value to just doing this the process of the collaborative mapping so it's not just the coastal risk product it's the social networking that you're developing capacity to access local observations in a very remote place along very important stretches of the coastline that are nationally important to the country energy security national security very important coastlines so you're this is this process that I developed in addition to creating a GIS that's usable locally it's a structured way to engage local Arctic communities in Arctic Observing Network activities more broadly so it's going to be very important but very challenging to incorporate local Arctic communities in Arctic Observing Network programs and once you realize that it's not just coastal risk you're talking about you can design the studies to have better access to in situ observations and also you can help identify local information needs that the Arctic Observing Network can address so the community mapping workshop that I did to collect local perspectives of coastline change I had about 50 participants in the three communities who contributed about 300 places where they've identified some kind of problems so I showed up with like 30 feet of map and asked them to place coded stickers all on the coastline and tell me about the issue in the verbally writing and then I digitized all of that to do the analysis and I came up I created three main bins subsistence impacts industrial impacts and municipal at the North Slope scale to give one example of a major risk that was identified and in Utkiarvik from land use manager this is Cross Island about it's just north of the Pruto Bay oil complex the village of New Exit located about 200 kilometers southwest relies heavily on Cross Island for their to hunt the bowhead whale bowhead whale hunting is extremely important for local communities on the North Slope not just major food security issue but it's basically the glue that holds the community together it's critical for cultural identity and the fear is that because Cross Island is so important for New Exit to successfully hunt the bowhead whale if they lose that ability then you may be talking about a village that gets decimated and this is already happening in the context of large scale oil and gas development lots of social pressures there the Cross Island the bowhead activity out of there is monitored by the federal government to assess the impacts of oil and gas development but to my knowledge there's no systematic monitoring of the island itself despite it's critical importance for New Exit the information usability workshop this consisted of me doing a live demonstration of this GIS that was installed on the local internet land use mapping system I did a brief presentation on how I created the data to give a window into kind of the back end what they were looking at to be able to start to evaluate it and just showed in the basic capability you can select a transect and bring up environmental information or you can zoom to an asset of interest to bring up some shoreline changes to have to build information and then after I did the presentation demonstration I asked a series of questions to get perceptions that were focused on getting three dimensions of information usability so saliency, credibility and legitimacy this is a widely used framework for information usability so saliency what is it relevant for your job I heard a lot about the boroughs permit review process where they're evaluating oil and gas projects wrote construction projects and they're doing without access to coastline change information and they saw that as an information flaw they're relying on the developers to provide that information so there was one piece of relevancy that came up towards credibility they don't know enough about the data to evaluate it but they do see it as a screening tool to do a quick look and decide whether or not they need to look closer legitimacy so how well the tool represents local values and priorities first thing they pointed out was you have to do your mapping in new exit this is where a lot of this the development's happening as I showed earlier some of coastline change impacts that directly impacts subsistence activity so that would be a next step to enhance legitimacy and the idea is you can keep going back and asking the same questions and then through time you get more specific about what what the product can address so back to this big picture of the you know viewing it not just as a a GIS product that addresses coastal risk the process and the map can also be viewed more generally as a boundary object that allows you to transform Arctic observing activities into usable information products to realize societal benefits so we're looking at is a the result of an exercise it did to identify Arctic observing activities that make it possible to create the GIS many of the USGS products are and know a products are are shown here so the subset then to the left have identified users and then potential societal benefit impacts then I'll end with noting that while the focus here was on coastal risk bringing coastline change information to local managers this process of doing this web mapping is not just to address that narrow set of issues the broader point of interacting in this very remote place and having access to local observers opens up opportunities to address other problems and prepare for things like environmental disasters like an oil spill so the same coastline change information that's usable for local land use decisions is also critical when you're preparing for and responding to an oil spill for example and don't underestimate the remoteness of this place if you're looking to send an asset to a really sensitive lagoon and you're looking at a map that was developed last year it's already outdated this place is rapidly changing and really there might be only one person because they travel to their camp that knows the status of a cut that allows you access to that lagoon so this becomes a very important local knowledge in the context of disaster preparedness on there thank you for your time so as your moderator I did a poor job on time management but I think the the content was excellent I thank you all for the presentations I'd like to turn it over to the folks in the room and online for any clarifying questions so that you'd like to ask the the panel there's got to be a few please do you have a microphone hand? so for for Michael's could you identify yourself please? I'm C.K. Shang from Ohio State University I am not a social scientist I work with one so so the question to you the question to you is that so are there migrations in the area that that you notice like like the local people do they migrate out so that's my question yeah and you know settlement patterns on the North Slope is very complicated and when you start to look at the available data like census data it's not it's not an adequate data set this is a population that doesn't necessarily want to be counted and they certainly don't want to be associated with one particular place that's one of the points of this presentation is of the activity is not just happening in these these villages it's happening all on because they're using the entire region the general migration pattern in the North Slope is towards Utiagvik which is the the biggest city there it's about 10,000 people to see to the borough government and in general the populations are moving into that area but at the same time you have individuals moving to other villages and outside but you do find that because of the cultural the bowhead whale hunting this people may leave for educational purpose but many of them come back but I think the population is more or less stable and then you get into is also the oil and gas population which is a different issue but also important to to acknowledge that's not just the local natives that live there other questions Dan Brown University of Washington this is a naive question I think what is the frequency of terrain mapping that we need given the it's a hard question I guess this frame that way given the dynamics of the terrain relative to melting and climate change and that sort of thing I guess maybe a better way to put it is how much uncertain do we have in the terrain products that we have given the temporal dynamics there's probably a couple of answers I can give a very technical answer to the IFSAR that it's five meter horizontal resolution and it's got two three meter vertical air I think maybe a little less but I think your questions really how often you need to collect that kind of data I don't know if we quite need persistent surveillance but it seems like you need something that's pretty close but the advent of satellite imagery and things like what Paul Moran has done with structure for motion you can almost get get that where you have repeat coverage pretty frequently whether that captures the air of phenomenology you're trying to collect that's a different question depends on what you're trying to collect I think but I'm sure there are other answers here too yeah that's that's a really hard question I was going to say something similar about the work that Paul Moran is doing is using digital globe world view polar orbiting satellites that have a really high revisit rate which is great but then they're they're optical so it's cloudy a lot of the time so even though you have that high revisit rate when they're not being challenged by another need that they would need to be used for we really can't get that revisit rate with satellites right now but it just depends on the surface that you're looking at and the time of year I guess it's sort of a related question or you're that you're raising is that time frequency of revisit rates an important element of mapping the Arctic here that may not be so important in other places and so deploying those kinds of technologies is important I was just going to say data driven refresh rates or something that we're really keen and dialing in to more in the Arctic which I think is one of the things you're getting at and it's been really challenging and at the very end of my presentation I showed that prioritization survey for coastal mapping coastlines there's one of the areas that are undergoing some of the most change especially on the north slope and even in those areas it's very chicken and egg I mean the rates are non-linear they are changing and as those are changing the refresh rate is also changing and so trying to track those things so that you can ensure that you are filling in the gaps on a renewing basis while also maintaining national and international consistency is really challenging and it does get back to a chicken and egg dilemma and we really that's one of the reasons I think we really need to speak to the value of having so many different parties involved and having so many partnerships and having close connections to the people on the ground who can highlight those areas of greater priority where the need is and when it arises just wanted to add that I think what's important here is data fusion because we have to be able to fuse things like constituent measurements satellite imagery airborne information coming from the regional communities and also looking at the different accuracies and errors within our sensors specifically in Arctic because we have areas that are melting when you're using things like synthetic aperture radar for example doesn't do very well when things are covered with water even though we're using it for flood mapping but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be accurately measuring ice when it's covered with water that has a lot to do with the physics of the permittivity which cannot penetrate through the radar and things like that well that wasn't an ignorant question or would you have your naive? naive yeah so this one is a naive question certainly so I'm always interested in this idea of like you know the rates of environmental change and how we sort of you know understand them and of course I you know I think about like places like New York City that had incredibly dynamic rates of environmental change and sort of physiographic change you know throughout much of the last couple of centuries and now we've got the technology to sort of start to understand that a little bit and I guess you know this is a question both to you all but also us you know other folks more generally in the room you know is there any lessons learned and you know Grady sort of started conversation this morning about the climate central piece sort of saying that we don't probably have the right data or new data becomes available we understand the risk of sea level rise even even more more powerfully so I guess the question I have and I know the urban context is is very difficult to sort of you know the dynamic urban context in the global south particularly is highly dynamic and you know how do you sort of measure the rates of environmental change in those kinds of context and then sort of like in other places of dynamic change like in the in the high arctic so I guess the question is is there you know for you guys lessons learned back to the urban community or from the urban people who are looking at dynamic urban places is there any lessons learned that could be you know provide some reference to understanding rates of you know measure rates of doing dramatic environmental change in the high arctic so I know it's you know apples and oranges potentially but I think that I'm always interested that can we do any cross is there any cross kind of learning between these different communities you know the folks looking at urban dynamic urban places and other dynamic environmental change locations as well so that's a big sloppy question I think there's a question in there and certainly naive but thank you I like that question I think there are a lot of ways to answer it and I hope we get a different answer from all of us yeah so I think it's actually in the session we heard this morning there was a lot of talk about stakeholder involvement understanding what the user's needs are and understanding what what people want from the products that you're providing and and we didn't really talk about that today we might touch on it a little bit more but but that's absolutely a lesson learned is getting getting people involved early on and don't start a new mapping project until you have somebody who wants it those are things that we learn all the time and relearn and still make the mistake and change community has done a really good job with that so when I sort of think about that question I think about it and sort of to what's that two-way flow of information and I think there's lots of little things that we can do when it comes to an exchange of knowledge but one of the unique things that we gain in remote Arctic environment is the experience of what's been happening and developed urban environments because we have a largely natural setting and so we have the opportunity to design green infrastructure from a green state and that's something that we haven't always been able to do in a lot of urban environments and so we can use the lessons learned from development patterns in cities to figure out how we can develop and responsibly create new development in the Arctic and then exchanging the information the other direction one of the things we like to say in Alaska and in the Arctic in general if you can do it in Alaska you can do it anywhere because it is it is remote it's very hard to do things and so when it comes to piloting and trying out drone systems and things like that that's not something you'll easily be able to pioneer in a dense urban area area necessarily but being able to do something like that in the Arctic is a really unique opportunity so two-way information so my my read on this question thinking more generally what I hear about in the context of trying to organize science in the Arctic is that there's an interest in identifying how Arctic science is relevant in general for lower latitudes what we can what insights we can learn and some some themes that I've I've learned I've kind of come across I think are prominent and we're talking about on that in that context is the role of in the emphasis on non-market values and doing kind of evaluations and the role the the emphasis that's placed on stakeholder values and priorities in in the the Alaska context I think because you're so closely related to you know connected to the ecosystems there I'm not saying that those that doesn't happen elsewhere in the world but when you think of cities it's more kind of the built infrastructure and I think this is something that the methods that have that have that are continuously being done have been done for for many years in Alaska settings the the work working closely very with very closely with local communities I think those methods can be can enhance what's being done in in other settings lower latitudes including urban settings and then collaboration I think it's something about the Arctic that's very unique is that you just you really need to collaborate work across boundaries to get things that you can do more readily in the lower latitudes so it's something I've seen in the last you have unique collaborations that develop to do what's much easier to do in the lower latitudes I think that's something that you know the closer you get to the urban setting closer you get to DC you start to see these stovepipes happening I think that those stovepipes the same agencies kind of tend to come together when you go to a place where you really need to collaborate yeah I would extend that one too the both both the Alaska mapping executive committee and the Arctic spatial data infrastructure make use of the government structures that exist I've been really impressed and frankly surprised at the level of coordination amongst federal agencies given some of these structures as a research scientist I looked at my bosses above me and thought the governance and the meetings were a waste of time I can tell you from my job now it is really important and very fruitful so seek out some of those relationships in many ways this is the only way that you'll be able to get what you want accomplished Hi Grady tool 3D ideas I have a question I think for Nicole and Mike and Nicole has a NOAA alum I'm going to ask you to put your NOAA hat on for this question so as we as we begin to change the refresh rate and certainly the resolution and accuracy of shoreline data up on the north I'd like to just remind everyone that the mean high water line from the NSPS is the legal boundary of the U.S. right so I'm wondering if what you're seeing or are you seeing more attention at the local level being paid to any changes in ownership of land or mineral rights associated with changing changing borders as we as the shorelines are changing if you would this is a topic up there yeah I mean I can I can take that one to start it's less of a topic than you'll think I have heard from folks that are concerned about fish camp and hunting camp property so there's a lot of historic and cultural land use that's distributed but that's really not regulated in the same way that land use is necessarily in the lower 48 and when it comes to the mean high water definition especially on the north slope it's so it's non-title on the on the north slope of Alaska and so that mean high water line is migrating backwards but even with the reduced number of tide stations up there it's still something that can be delineated more easily than it might be in the areas on in western Alaska where the erosion rate is actually more gradual and so from a practical perspective I haven't seen that arising too much but it is something we might see as we move forward I'll just add that the land use in Alaska north slope I'm most familiar with it's not static so lands are being transferred withdrawals are constantly being made and the changing shoreline does impact those selections both out of preference for using land if you're eroding away you don't necessarily want to own that piece of land but also legal for legal purposes so regional corporation lands for example to have surface rights in the national petroleum reserve Alaska you have to use that parcel of land for commercial or industrial purposes and as a place over called Cape Halcat that's thought to be rapidly eroding the use geological survey rates show that it's eroding rapidly the regional corporation the native regional corporation there says they're actually seeing accretion happening and they want to develop that parcel because they would like to access some of the capture some of the benefits for the oil and gas development so the if they're unable to develop if they don't get approval to develop then they might need to give up that parcel of land and this kind of thing is playing out elsewhere you're getting the native corporations are looking to secure land where there might be an oil pipeline that lands there it's happening over by Wayne Wright in Alaska where a parcel of land several years ago now was recently transferred by an old defense early warning radar site because that may be the landing point for an oil and gas pipeline to connect offshore to the trans-laska pipeline system now the that might not happen because it's very difficult to barge through the the inlet that would require be required to sustain that as a an industrial base so that's environmental pressure that is making that scenario for pipeline unlikely and that's not just nor slope interest obviously that's bigger Alaska having access to the offshore oil and gas development so just think this is not static land use that people are moving and I think that we wrongly conceptualize the region where we think of those land uses of static and I would just add too that it's not just land there's maritime extent too and so as that's moving as the shorelines retreating we're seeing a shift in the defined territorial limits of the U.S. and the Arctic as well and that has strong implications for development of the Arctic region Glenn McDonald from UCLA I had two questions one was geopolitical and the other one was technical the geopolitical one is really look at the cooperation with Russia and the SDI and the Russia has reacted pretty strongly to the U.S. Marine training along the Norwegian border and things like that there's been various flight episodes that have happened in terms of the Arctic in terms of Russian aircraft and things like that do you find that that just basically is noise in the background and the cooperation continues or is the way you guys are cooperating such that tactical or strategical products aren't being developed from it you know how what was the political sense there I can speak to it anecdotally just from when the U.S. was leading the Arctic SDI effort and just from what I heard from the national contact point I think it's it was mostly noise it was we were a few layers below that top geopolitical level and we're perhaps a bit insulated but I would hear that we would plan for Arctic Council meetings and at the last minute Russia wouldn't be able to go or they would miss a few and then they would show up with the world's best data and they would contribute for a little while and then they would fall off and then they would contribute again so I think in the end it ended up being a little bit of noise but in the most people really and I think all countries did collaborate and contribute yeah thank you very much I just was wondering about that the other thing is that so the coastline change is important in the Arctic but I think far more important is permafrost agridation and I know that in nature there was a paper that came out looking at I think Lancent data up to 2014 by Nietzsche at all as a kind of an overview map so is there any kind of a way or thought about having some sort of dynamic product which will be monitoring permafrost degradation over time? I think there's a lot of interest in that and there's even a lot of interest in improving a map of permafrost extent as well which is actually fairly poor still so that's an outstanding data gap and it gets back to that would love to be able to monitor it better but that baseline data is still somewhat inadequate the USGS has a very large footprint in Alaska we have an Alaska Science Center with a number of scientists that are carrying on studies all across the state I think they've mostly produced those kinds of products as one officer static products not dynamic ones I don't I just don't aware or I don't have the background to speak to what the refresher update or monitoring would be but as you mentioned there's a lot of interest it's definitely something where we're following so one way that you can measure differences in permafrost change is to use NSAR and to ferrometrics R the problem with that is that you need an exact orbital revisit so if you orbit one has to go and orbit one in the 16th day cycle that it comes back the satellite's going back to but the good news is that the Canadians just launched in May their RCM radar type constellation which is the revisit right now it's going to be four days because they have more than one SAR system so I think that people should definitely make use of that if possible okay I think their time allotment is just about exhausted I want to thank our keynote speaker and our panelists for the great contributions today everything from the international level of sharing and cooperation that's going on all the way to the local perspective and the need to ground yourself in the support to the locals all the way up to the international level and I was really impressed with the level of innovation going on to capture the basic information necessary to to really understand the area and I want to thank you all for your contributions and round of applause please break to log 245 right 15 minute break two minutes