Ecological Analysis of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Audubon Alaska

Audubon Alaska is an organization working on conserving Alaska’s natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats, for the benefit and enjoyment of current and future generations. The main study area of this project, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain was recently opened to oil development. This action will result in lots of change in evaluating the wildlife and environmental resources. Audubon Alaska is aiming at using maps and geospatial analysis to inform a broad audience including agency decision-makers, scientists, congressional staff and environmental groups of the results of this action.

Tasks

The three major tasks in this project are: creating a map atlas of the wildlife and environmental resources at stake, digitizing historical maps into vector shapefile or raster datasets, and perform species distribution modeling on specific species.

Difficulties

The major difficulties of this project are the gaps between datasets and to downscale them to the coastal plain. I utilized the wide range of dataset provided by Audubon Alaska using ArcMap and performed species distribution modeling in R to create and visualize the mid-scale dataset. I also used R packages and remote sensing techniques in R to automate digitizing the historical maps.