SCIENTISTS IN SPRAYSKIRTS
Adventurers & Scientists for Conservation matches outdoor recreationists with scientists who need data from the field.
EXTREME SCIENCE TIP#04 USE YOUR VOICE
Let decision makers know you value wild places. “Any time you visit public land, write a quick email that says you appreciate that place and send it to two people: the land manager and your elected official,” says Andis.
Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction uses a sensor-laden kayak to collect data on water quality and algae blooms in the Columbia River Estuary.
The Ikkatsu Project tracks tsunami debris for NOAA on the Olympic and Aleutian coasts.
The Kamchatka Project, a crack kayak team led by Bryan Smith, collected hydrologic and water quality data on pristine rivers in the Russian Far East in 2010.
U.S. Forest Service Kayak Rangers in Tracy Arm-Ford’s Terror Wilderness near Juneau, Alaska, monitor air quality emissions from cruise ships.
From urban waterways to the planet’s most remote coasts, paddlers turned citizen scientists are using kayaks to bring back findings no one else can.
Margo Pelligrino, a self- styled “stay-at-home mom who paddles for the ocean,” collected microplastic samples on outrigger journeys along the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts between 2007 and 2010.
Forest Succession Study at Stanford University used sea kayaks in the summer of 2012 to study the ripple effects of Alaska yellow-cedar decline linked to climate change.
The Cetacean Society and Bay Area Sea Kayakers collect observations of harbor porpoises, which have returned to San Francisco Bay after a 65-year absence.
Willamette Riverkeeper volunteer paddlers monitor water quality on Oregon’s Willamette River.
Decisions had to be made for science. “Do we want to paddle six more miles up that inlet and back to survey that beach—yes, we have to,” explains Avery. “You’re not on a pleasure trip. There’s a job to be done and we’re going to do it right.”
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here’s another critical element to the hands-on-science done by outdoors lovers: a deep and complex relationship with wilder- ness. It’s been central to Alaska ever since William Seward scraped together $7.2 million in 1867 to buy 586,412 square miles of wilder- ness from the Russian Empire.
Alaska’s natural bounty is its raison d’etre. Everyone who comes here, for a week or a lifetime, comes either for the natural environ- ment, for a job related to the natural environment or for a job provid- ing infrastructure to those who are here for the natural environment. As a tourism report dryly notes, “Very few people visit Alaska for the culture or the built environment.” The conflicts that have polar-
ized Alaska over the decades have been about the best use of this bounty: as board feet, fish, solitude or science. In Southeast, 50-year contracts between the Forest Service and the timber industry after World War II built an economy on logging old-growth trees from public lands and feeding massive pulp mills. Commercial and recreational fishing made up the rest. Conservation gathered steam with the environmental laws of the 1970s, culminating in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, which spawned the state’s vast network of parks and wilderness areas. By the late ‘80s, both sides in the logging versus environment debate had dug in. Conservation organizations saw the Forest Ser- vice as favoring logging and settled on two strategies: litigation and lobbying. Then the ground began to shift under their feet. Tourism overtook timber, then fishing, in job creation and economic impact. As the economic tide turned, wilderness science offered a path to common ground amongst Alaskans who loved the land. Today, conservation groups still litigate and lobby, but SCS also fights for the Forest Service’s budget, trying to stave off a 50 percent cut in wilderness management and redirect funds from large timber operations toward science and stewardship. “We’re surrounded by public lands, and we depend on them for subsistence, for our fish and deer and beach asparagus,” says Andis. “All the tourism operators understand viewsheds and pristine areas. They have to.”
In addition to local paddlers ground-truthing proposed timber sales in preparation for appeals, in 2009 the Sitka Conservation Society began running wilderness expeditions to provide the Forest Service with data for management. Two years later, they also helped the
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