Collaborative Research: NSF R2I2: Building Resilience Along Permafrost River Corridors in Alaska

Much of the Arctic is underlain by perennially frozen ground known as permafrost. Over the last few decades, the Arctic is thawing and destabilizing riverbanks and affecting infrastructure, water quality, and fish habitat. Additionally, a significant portion of the United States' natural resources and national security interests are contained within river corridors in Alaska. Arctic and Subarctic Federal, State, and Tribal governments need advanced knowledge and tools to identify and assess more accurately riverbank erosion vulnerability and risk in order to guide local decision-makers. Phase-1 of this work includes an interdisciplinary team of physical and social scientists, land managers, engineering design firms, stakeholders and land owners at local, tribal and federal levels. This team is well positioned to integrate advanced research techniques with community needs to document and forecast ongoing landscape and river changes, and enable the development of pragmatic solutions to protect investments in infrastructure. This project is poised to make an impact with science that informs public policy; increases partnerships between local community members, academia, industry, non-profit, and government sectors; and develops an American workforce in interdisciplinary applied science. This project will develop new state-of-the-art approaches to critical and immediate environmental threats to communities and infrastructure in Arctic Alaska. Solution strategies include: 1) information-based tools for decision making including river-erosion forecasting tools and watershed monitoring networks; and 2) physical solutions to changing rivers including community scale infrastructure to mitigate erosion and siltation and watershed scale solutions. The project will leverage recent advances in Earth science including satellite imagery and novel sub-pixel and machine-learning techniques for change detection, theoretical advances in permafrost erosion and mud transport prediction, low-cost sensor networks for autonomous monitoring of water quality, high-throughput microbial sequencing-as-sensing techniques, and collaborative cyberinfrastructure for watershed monitoring. Solutions will be used to forecast river erosion to protect important infrastructure, increase the ability to mitigate physical risk once identified, and manage water quality for human health and aquatic life. The modeling tools can be broadcast into the future, aiding in decision making that will minimize long-term damage and costs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.