BE/CNH: A Temporal Perspective on Biocomplexity in the Aleutian Islands

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Two interdisciplinary workshops will focus on ecological change and human impacts during the Holocene on the Aleutian Islands. The Aleutian Islands represent a model ecosystem to track human-environment interactions over the past 10,000 years. The Aleutians contain a 9,000-year record of human occupation. For most of the Holocene, the archipelago has formed the boundary between the North Pacific Rim and Bering Sea. The region is a rich ecotone with ocean fisheries, large sea mammal populations, thick kelp forests, complex near-shore ecosystems and intertidal zones, spawning streams, and a highly diverse avian fauna. The workshops will be used to (1) identify existing oceanographic, climatological, geophysical, and biological data that document complex environmental change in the Aleutians; (2) identify research areas and investigators needed to provide additional data necessary to reconstruct environmental change in the Aleutians; and (3) correlate existing data from the physical and biological sciences with the recorded history of human occupation of, and adaptation to, the island chain; and (4) design a research strategy to provide a more precise temporal framework for Holocene environmental change and concomitant human responses. This project is an award emanating from the FY 2001 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.