ИСТИНА

The Rapid Arctic Transitions due to Infrastructure and Climate (RATIC) initiative is a forum for developing and sharing new ideas and methods to facilitate the best practices for assessing, responding to, and adaptively managing the cumulative effects of Arctic infrastructure and climate change. Arctic Science Summit Week 2015 in Toyama, Japan (23–30 April) brought together nearly 700 international scientists, students, policy makers, research managers, Indigenous Peoples and others interested in developing, prioritizing and coordinating plans for future Arctic research (www.assw2015.org). Members and Fellows of the IASC Cryosphere Working Group, Social & Human Working Group, and the Terrestrial Working Group produced and IASC white paper (Walker & Peirce 2015) that summarizes the activities of two RATIC workshops at the Arctic Change 2014 Conference in Ottawa, Canada and the 2015 Third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP III) meeting in Toyama, Japan. In this poster we will summarize five case studies with conclusions and recommendations presented at these conferences. The major conclusions from workshops were: • There is a pressing need to examine the cumulative effects of infrastructure in the context of Arctic social-ecological systems (Fig. 1). Each case study had a unique set of social, economic, political, ecological, technological, and climatic ¨drivers of change” that require regionally appropriate adaptive management approaches to mitigate adverse changes. • Permafrost thawing and its associated impacts on natural and built environments were clearly identified as priority issues at all locations. The specific issues related to permafrost differed in each region and require detailed ground-level knowledge for predicting change and planning purposes.. • The indirect effects of infrastructure exceed the direct effects of the planned footprints. Fragmentation of large intact ecosystems is a major impact that is inadequately addressed in Russia and North America. Assessments of infrastructure must address effects on the adjacent ecosystems, local communities, regions, and areas outside the Arctic. • New GIS and remote-sensing tools are needed to assess regional changes over large areas now affected by infrastructure and climate change. The spatial resolution of current global scale remote-sensing databases is inadequate to detect changes to fine-scale patterned ground features and to monitor details of infrastructure change. High-resolution imagery is great but is costly and not available for all areas, but can be used for hierarchical analysis of smaller regions. • The cumulative interactions between infrastructure and climate change are not adequately addressed by any national or international-level Arctic science plan. NASA LCLUC is providing examples of scientific approaches to the issue of cumulative effects of infrastructure development in Russia and North America. Other examples are available from industry and other Arctic governments.