Understanding the Changing Natural-Built Landscape in an Arctic Community

Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of The National Science Foundation’s 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, enhances efforts in formal and informal education, and integrates the co-production of knowledge where appropriate. This award fulfills part of that aim by addressing interactions among social systems, natural environment, and built environment in the following NNA focus areas: Arctic Residents, Data and Observation, Education, and Resilient Infrastructure.

Arctic communities face many challenges as they grow and develop in the context of a rapidly changing environment. These challenges include coastal erosion, permafrost thaw, and ecosystem change. This project is developing and deploying a network of environmental sensors collecting continuous information over a five-year period in terrestrial and aquatic locations within the community of Utqiagvik. The sensor network yields an unprecedented dataset for examining the interactive effects of the natural and built environments. This project is improving the health and economic well-being of Utqiagvik and potentially other North Slope Borough villages in Alaska.

This research investigates two essential challenges for the Arctic city of Utqiagvik, Alaska: i) the impacts of existing community infrastructure practices on the surrounding tundra, coastal, and lagoon landscapes within and around the city, and ii) the impacts of a changing environment on the design and future planning of community infrastructure and buildings. The ultimate goal of the project is to understand how the natural and built environments interact with social systems in an Arctic city.

UVA Research Computing is supporting this research by hosting computational services to ingest, process, transform, store, and serve sensor data over the life of the project. A scalable data service named HSDS runs within a containerized environment in the HPC networks to aggregate the collected sensor data. This service is backed by object storage, and is then served internally for research using a variety of data analysis tools.

Data: https://arcticdata.io/

Award: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2022639

PI: Howard Epstein, Chair, Dept. of Environmental Sciences.

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