ELOKA team members attended the Arctic Observing Summit (AOS), a biannual meeting focused on Arctic observing, at the end of March in Edinburgh, Scotland. ELOKA team members helped organize two sessions on Indigenous Data Sovereignty as part of the Data Sharing working group.
ELOKA members attended a meeting in January 2024 in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, where Indigenous guardians met to discuss data collection, usage, management, and ultimately data sovereignty.
Margaret Anamaq H.C. Rudolf is a postdoctoral researcher with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is Iñupiaq with her family originally coming from King Island, but she grew up in Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska. Grounded in her Iñupiaq values and the practicality of her engineering background, her work centers around making research actionable and useful for Alaska Native communities on the frontlines of climate change.
YiSha has worked for National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) as an undergraduate student researcher since fall 2021. Growing up around Boulder, Colorado, she decided to do her undergraduate program at the University of Colorado Boulder, majoring in Biochemistry and minoring in Marketing. Her interest in science includes anything related to bacteria, the environment, and its ecosystems. She has been working with ELOKA to update the Atlas of Community-Based Monitoring in a Changing Arctic and to add video content to the Yup'ik Atlas.
In August 2023, ELOKA partners gathered at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF), and spent four days strengthening connections and setting goals and priorities for ELOKA. Partners traveled from different regions in Alaska, British Columbia and Labrador, Canada, and Finland.
In November 2022, videography experts from the organization See Stories taught videomaking skills to a classroom of Chevak sixth graders in Alaska. Fifteen short videos will eventually make it the online Nunaput Atlas, which ELOKA helped create.
Working with Indigenous communities takes time, resources, and patience, but a shift is needed in science to include community voices and observations to widen and deepen our collective breadth of knowledge. The Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA), a NSIDC program, continues to collaborate with the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub (AAOKH) to support an online community-led observational data hub.
This site discusses traditional ways people in Western Alaska and Chukotka, Russia, use plants for food medicine and other purposes.
Beringia is the region including the Bering Strait and the land on either side of it. Some people define the term narrowly to include only the westernmost part of the Seward Peninsula in Alaska and the easternmost part of the Chukotsky Peninsula in Russia. However, we prefer a broader definition that includes much of Alaska and Chukotka.
On December 6 and 7, 2022, ELOKA met with partners at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Alaska, to make plans for partner involvement in ELOKA’s work through the end of the current National Science Foundation (NSF) award in early 2026.
The ELOKA team is growing! In the fall of 2022, we added two new positions to our team: an outreach and network manager and postdoctoral researcher.