Objective

The Department of Defense (DoD) manages 1.5 million acres of training land in three main areas within the Tanana River basin of Interior Alaska--Donnelly Training Area, the Yukon Training Area, and the Tanana Flats Training Area. Geographically, this region extends from Fairbanks south to the Alaska Range and east and west across the Tanana River basin. These lands are managed by the Army but are also used by the Air Force. Due to increased training pressures at other major installations in the U.S. the Alaska training areas have seen increased interest in training, usage, and infrastructure development over the past ten years. This increased training land usage and management is expected to continue. Future climate scenarios predict an approximately 5°C increase in mean annual air temperatures for this region over the next 80 years. This warming is expected to degrade permafrost in many areas of Alaska, which will dramatically affect surface hydrology, soil, and vegetation. Some locations are expected to become wetter, which would affect wetlands status, vegetation, and species diversity. This would likely present potential access and mobility issues for the Army or other land users. Other locations are expected to become drier with climate warming. This could lead to increased wildfire frequency and vegetation shifts. The potential ecosystem responses to climate warming and to non-climatic anthropogenic stressors could have severe ramifications for how, where, and when the DoD can train in Alaska. Other land users in Interior Alaska are facing a similar challenge.

The objective of this project is to develop a geographic information systems (GIS) based decision support system using spatially explicit ecosystem response data on climate and non-climate related anthropogenic stressors. We will use a combination of field work and modeling to make predictions on how climate warming is most likely to affect surface hydrology, soils, and vegetation in Interior Alaska. The results will be synthesized into a decision support system to provide U.S. Army Alaska land and facility managers with information to help make decisions regarding development of future training and installation management plans. Our GIS-based approach will combine user input and critical landscape-change analyses, field surveys, and coupled hydrologic thermal modeling based on projected climate change outcomes to generate ecosystem response parameters to the year 2100. This type of research effort has never been done in Interior Alaska. We will work with other land managers, research collaborators, and other land users to ensure our results provide input to planning on non-Department of Defense lands in Interior Alaska as well. We anticipate the results from our climate and thermal modeling will have application to other locations where seasonally frozen (and thawed) soils are present. Though the project objectives are mostly applied research we plan to identify and address basic research gaps in our understanding of permafrost hydrology, climate modeling, and ecosystem responses to change.