News and Announcements

Andreas Pflitsch is a professor of physical geography at Ruhr University in the German city of Bochum. He has studied climatic conditions in ice caves in a number of U.S. states since 1996.

At ISER, he’ll talk about his research in ice caves in Alaska and in glacial caves on volcanoes in Oregon and Washington. Many glaciers have far-reaching cave systems in the ice, and Dr. Pflitsch's work is some of the first to assess climatic conditions in those caves. Join us at ISER to hear what he's learned.

When: Thursday, March 23, 12 to 1

The 2017 national conference of Citizen Review Panels (CRPs) will be held on the UAA campus May 10-12, hosted by the Alaska Citizen Review Panel and sponsored by a number of organizations inside and outside UAA. Diwakar Vadapalli, assistant professor of public policy at ISER, chairs the Alaska panel, and ISER is sponsoring the keynote speaker, Debra Schilling Wolfe, a nationally recognized expert on child welfare and executive director of the Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice, and Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Federal law requires all states to establish CPRs, to help protect children from abuse and neglect. The panels give the public opportunities to comment on policies of the agencies responsible for protecting children, and they also review child-protection policies and make recommendations for change.

To learn more about the conference and how to register, download the flier (PDF, 377KB).

How might steps Alaska's state government takes to balance its budget affect Alaska families? Different ways of closing the state's $3 billion budget gap—the result of lower oil prices and dwindling oil revenues—will have different effects on households with and without children, according to a new report by Matthew Berman and Random Reamey of ISER. They looked specifically at how state income, sales, or property taxes and a cut in Permanent Fund dividends would affect incomes of households with and without children. 

No one has automatic rights to use water in Alaska: the state constitution defines water as a public resource, and the state government decides who can use water, how much, and for what. That's true on both public and private land, and for all landowners—government agencies, businesses, and individual Alaskans.

Anyone who wants to use a significant amount of water has to apply to the state for water rights. A new paper by Marie Lowe and Linda Leask of ISER explains the basics of water rights in Alaska: what they are, when you need them, how to apply for them, and how many have been issued so far.

Download the paper, Understanding Water Rights in Alaska (PDF, 637KB). A supplemental file (PDF, 3.9MB) of some cited references is also available. If you have questions, get in touch with Marie Lowe, associate professor of public policy, at mlowe@alaska.edu or 907-786-6534.

Commercial and recreational fisheries are very different: the commercial fishery is a resource extraction, processing, and retailing industry; the recreational fishery is a form of outdoor recreation, influenced not only by the availability of fish but by the environmental setting and other factors aside from fish. How can we make a fair comparison of their economic value?

Gordon Gislason, a fisheries economist from Vancouver, British Columbia, talks about a framework he has developed for analyzing and comparing the economic value of the two kinds of fisheries. As a case study, he estimated the commercial and recreational values of Chinook salmon in Pacific Canada. Please join us to hear what he found.

A new report by Bob Loeffler and Jennifer Schmidt of ISER looks at jobs and income residents of small Bristol Bay communities received during exploration at the proposed Pebble mine site from 2009 through 2012. That proposed mine is enormously controversial, because of its proximity to the world-class Bristol Bay salmon fisheries, and there has been no exploration since 2013. The authors emphasize they are neither endorsing nor opposing the proposed mine. Rather, they assessed the economic effects of Pebble exploration on local communities as a case study in how small, remote communities can capture more of the benefits of rural resource development.

They found that about 43% of the workers at the Pebble exploration site from 2009 through 2012 were residents of 18 small Bristol Bay communities. That totaled about 300 Bristol Bay residents over the four-year period. Residents of the seven communities closest to the exploration site got the most jobs and income, averaging 100 jobs a year and bringing nearly $1.5 million into their communities annually. Almost all the jobs were seasonal, and pay averaged $19 an hour.

Download the summary (PDF, 454KB) or the full report (PDF, 2MB). If you have questions, get in touch with Bob Loeffler at rloeffle@alaska.edu or call 907-250-4621. You can also contact Jennifer Schmidt at jischmidt0@gmail.com or call 907-786-5497.

Kevin Berry joined ISER in January as an assistant professor of economics, with a joint appointment in UAA’s economics department. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wyoming in 2015, and after that he was a post-doctoral associate at Yale University, studying adaptive human behavior and infectious disease.