• 
• Bering Sea Sub-Network (BSSN)
• Images of the Arctic (IOTA)
• Seasonal Ice Zone Observing Network (SIZONet)
• SnowChange
• Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council
• Yup'ik Environmental Knowledge Project

 

Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council

The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC) stands as a collective initiative of 70 rural, Indigenous communities across Alaska and the Yukon Territory with a mission to monitor, advocate, and advise in order to improve the well-being of the watershed and the people who live within it. The Council has set preservation priorities, increased its own capacity to measure water quality, and successfully advocated to remedy and prevent further environmental degradation of the Yukon River watershed. The overall goal of the YRITWC is to link local and traditional knowledge (LTK) with science about the watershed.

The YRITWC has initiated the Strategic Needs on Water in the Yukon (SNOWY) project, which will provide a holistic view of climate change effects on human populations by addressing the year-round relationship between the local populations and the hydrological cycle in the Yukon River Basin (YRB) to better understand issues, related to water quality and quantity. This research partnership utilizes existing resources and experience to support an investigation that promotes community participation based on locally derived questions addressing challenges facing the Indigenous Nations of the YRB. This will more thoroughly define the intersection between the social, natural, and Indigenous sciences. This research will be accomplished using a combination of facilitated dialogue through semi-directed interviews and collection of snow, ice, and water data. A key outcome of this project will be a geospatial database that presents the information and data collected for broad dissemination of results to the community. The qualitative data collected will represent communities at the local scale, but combined with the quantitative data will contribute to a better understanding of the regional hydrologic framework of the lower YRB.

Lead		Leah Mackey and Carol Thomas
Organization		Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council
Country		United States Canada
Geographic Coverage		Western Yukon River Basin
Communities		Emmonak, Kotlik, and Saint Mary's, Alaska
Related Organizations	U.S. Geological Survey U.S. Forest Service Colorado State University
Web site		Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council