This talk is a fact-finding mission and bridge building opportunity between JPL scientists and local organizations, traditional knowledge experts, and local scientists. To help to characterize the social, ecological and climate conditions of coastal Alaska, I will cover some example case studies where community engagement and community-based concepts have been successful. The emphasis will be on utilizing earth observation technology to understand local environmental variability, meteorological forecasting, to understand change across local marine, atmospheric, and hydrological systems.

To further the goal of the Earth Science Division (ESD) within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the pathway will focus on novel team-based cross community collaboration that offers to help build up these collaborations between coastal stakeholders in Alaska. One metric of the success of the project will be illustrating at a local level how earth system science can inform society. Another metric of success will be the successful engagement of scientists as active listeners/partners within communities involved with addressing local change. The purpose of this talk will be to gauge if there is an interest in this sort of collaboration here at JPL, and to see how we might move the idea forward if it shows signs of interest from the wider community.

Dr. Pyare is a professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska, Southeast. Dr. Pyare’s research interests include: GIS-supported landscape assessment, ground-truthing GIS and remotely sensed resources, landscape connectivity, habitat modeling, animal dispersal/movement, aquatic-terrestrial-marine interactions, hands-on/experiential education, and supporting information needs of resource managers.

Dr. Pyare has successfully initiated several educational grant opportunities for underrepresented students, including:

• Alaska SpaceGrant: An earth-observation course in community-based, environmental problem solving
• CERCLE: a community-rooted, pre-college STEM springboard