Quantifying the True Scale of Human Footprint in Alaska
By Aaron Thomas
Using new analytical techniques, UAF’s Professor Falk Huettman and graduate researcher Moriz Steiner declared that over 99 percent of Alaska has been affected by humans. Through the use of software that quantifies patterns within landscapes, they were able to evaluate the entire state of Alaska (1,517,733 km2) for signs of human impact at a 30 meter resolution. In an interview with The Sun Star, the researchers explained what their findings mean for Alaskans and conservationists across the world.
The team’s goal was to better understand the totality of human impacts on Alaska’s landscape instead of using more traditional approaches that only measure localized development. Most methods to quantify human impact typically involve measuring things such as deforestation, city expansion, road construction, and resource extraction. While these are all significant to understanding human footprint, they do not account for a myriad of more subtle factors.
Past partial studies of human impact on Alaska measured by physical area and human development — claimed only 0.067 percent of the total surface of the state has been impacted. This makes Alaska seem pristine compared to many places in the Lower 48.
Huettman explained that boundaries such as roads, trails, pipelines, and frequently used waterways can all contribute to habitat fragmentation, a process where large areas of land become subdivided and isolated from each other. Further, contaminants such as airborne nitrogen fertilizers, PFAS “forever chemicals”, air pollution carried over from Asia, as well as rising levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere can all contribute to Alaska’s human footprint.
Boundaries between areas under different management agencies can also lead to habitat fragmentation. Separate jurisdictions of federal land, state land, private land, and Indigenous land are all managed with different methods. This leads to divisions in habitat because varying degrees of human intervention can visibly alter separate sections of land—despite the fact that there is no physical boundary.
Quantifying all these different factors over an area as expansive as Alaska presented several challenges to the team. One difficulty they encountered was designing a program that could analyze such a large file size. Fragstats, the program the researchers used to analyse their data, could initially only run a file size equivalent to the area of a single city. They were able to rectify this by running the Fragstats algorithm in a separate statistical analysis software. This new program was able to be run on a laptop, but it was also upscaled and run on one of UAF’s cloud supercomputers for a more detailed analysis.
By adding up these different layers of human impacts on a grid, Huettman and Steiner could examine any given area for how many layers of impacts it had. While it is not surprising that major urban hubs such as Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau were found to contain over 20 different layers of human impact, they discovered that even the most remote areas they studied within National Parks and Northwestern Alaska all contained numerous impact layers. In fact, there was not a single area in that state that did not have at least two impact layers. Despite having a very small relative population, many remote villages across the state also contained large footprints from factors such as invasive species, deforestation, winter trails, traveled waterways, road networks, and occasionally mining.
Huettman stressed the significance of the scale of human impact in Alaska, because the state contains approximately 60% of National Park land by volume. He questioned how well the program is currently serving the American public with the human footprints these parks contain, and wonders what effects continuing to diminish staff and funding will have on their future. These are lands that should be pristine on paper, but the data shows a different story.
“There's no wilderness in Alaska, really,” Huettman said.
Their findings show that nearly 100 percent of Alaska’s surface has undergone changes from human impacts. With this figure, Huttman and Steiner want people to move away from the idea that human footprint can only be caused by directly altering land with practices such as development, logging, construction, and mining. Many of the real changes that are being observed on the ground take place in areas far from large-scale projects. Huettman stressed that it is the cumulative impact that is most important to understand. “Alaska has a tendency to not look at the synergy,” Huettman said.
During the interview, Huettman also made the case that our current approach to managing land in Alaska is flawed because it relies on the assumption that things can be cleaned up after the fact. While he notes that cleanup is an important aspect to minimizing human impact in Alaska, it has limits and some changes cannot be reversed. Practices such as creating superfund sites where contaminants are allowed to be dumped for hopes of future removal does little to minimise environmental damage in the present.
Huettman also made an important distinction between Indigenous land use and the large-scale environmental impacts that are being observed today. He pointed out that Indigenous populations in Alaska have lived here for thousands of years and have never created a human footprint to the scale we are seeing today. Most of the changes analyzed in the study have occurred after 1950, when wide scale industrial projects and development began to pick up in the state.
“We are basically showing a crisis, really, on pristine lands, on wilderness, on the whole Alaskan identity. Alaska is wilderness, right?” said Huettman.
The researchers hope that in bringing forward this information, people can lose the perception that Alaska is a pristine wilderness. The popular narrative that Alaska has little to no human footprint could pose a hindrance to action in environmental policy because it is based on the assumption that the pristine land is the status quo for Alaska.
The team wants their methods to be adapted by other researchers to better analyse human footprint over the entire Arctic, of which Alaska is only a relatively small part when compared to Asia and Canada. They hoped their findings would encourage others across the world to take up similar initiatives, influence future environmental policy, and encourage the use of more Indigenous knowledge in land conservation.
Another area of potential future research that Huettman brought up is looking at the human impact on oceans around Alaska. With numerous shipping routes, cruise lines, and commercial fishing operations that operate around Alaska, looking at oceans could be a critical insight. While the study was comprehensive of Alaska’s landmass, it excluded the oceans that surround Alaska’s harbors and ports, which are relevant to the discussion on managing Alaska’s environment.
As Steiner and Huettmann have shown in their work, environmental research in Alaska is a field that is constantly evolving out of necessity in a world that is changing faster than ever. Studies such as these can be an important call to action for citizens and lawmakers alike. While Alaska is undoubtedly one of the wildest places in the world, it seems nowhere can truly escape the growing impacts of human activity.