Arctic Science Summit Week 2025 and ICARPIV

SK: My name is Shawnee Kasanke and I am with the Arctic Biological Research (ABR) in Fairbanks, Alaska. 

MH: My name is Meghan Holtan. I live in Anchorage, Alaska, and I'm working on my PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. We're here on the patio next to the Indigenous Pavilion, having a conversation about our experience so far at the Arctic Science Summit Week.

SK: Okay, so Meghan, what was a memorable moment or your favorite part about this conference? 

MH: My favorite part was probably the Mongolian throat singing, yesterday morning. I think it was maybe one of the best musical experiences of my life, which sounds very superlative, but is accurate.  It was super beautiful - I've never heard that kind of music before. He [Bayarbaatar Bavuudorj] demoed the three ranges of throat singing. He also had this instrument that was threaded with double sets of horse hairs that he played, and then he was able to harmonize his throat singing.  I think it was especially cool to have hosted it in the Indigenous Pavilion within the context of this Arctic Science Summit week. Having artists here and artists talks is really living the idea of the co-production of knowledge within different knowledge systems. The artists who have participated in sessions and talks have been so generous in explaining how their art organizes knowledge for them and their community.  Very beautiful, but also very cool from an intellectual perspective.

SK: Yeah, like how art can be a form of science? I've never really thought about it from that perspective before. 

MH: Yes, and science is like art, in that we bring our own excitement and creativity to the way we design research and collect data. 

MH: How about you? What was one of your favorite moments? 

SK: For me, this is very specific, but I really, really enjoyed the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Science Initiative (CAVSI) workshop, which took place right before the main conference started. As someone who's been trying to be involved in Arctic vegetation science since I started grad school, it was really amazing to be in the same room with all of these people whom I knew about and had read the papers of, exchanging ideas with them as peers and just seeing the amount of knowledge being shared between the people that were part of that workshop and their experiences and their ideas for the future.

The experience really gave me some hope for the progression of a field that I feel is often overlooked and under prioritized, even though obviously vegetation keeps everything else moving and running and alive and healthy. so that was just really inspirational and encouraging, at a time when I really needed it.

I also really appreciated and loved the depth of the involvement of Indigenous folks that were here, their communities, and the efforts they put into this. I've been at many conferences where we always talk about the need to include indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices, and it's almost sort of like a checkbox situation, but here it was truly woven throughout this entire conference and on every single level from the leadership to the panellists, to the science, art and everything else. I really loved seeing that as something that's actually functioning in a meaningful way now, and not just this thing that we all sort of want to do but don't know how to approach. 

MH: I also appreciated how there were the closed sessions so that way it was like making space for not having to share knowledge also, and being able to still use this huge week of everyone meeting up to be able to connect in ways that felt better. 

SK: Yeah, hopefully. I agree with that, too. 

MH: Part of the reason we're sitting here is we met at the Polar Early Career World Summit which happened for three days at the beginning of the ASSW. It was really cool be able to meet you through that and feel a stronger connection to you than just being thrown into this giant 800 person conference

Like you were saying, it's living the ideals of interdisciplinarity because we’re there working with people who are soil scientists and botanists and ice researchers, Indigenous artists. 

SK: Everybody from every field. Yeah, it was nice to have the opportunity to be able to connect.

And it was right before the main conference so we all got to know each other. And there were so many social activities during that Workshop that I felt like it gave us all a really good opportunity to get to know each other. I feel like I made a number of friends and hopefully colleagues that I'll be in touch with for real in the future. We even formed a specific vegetation specific subgroup of early career researchers from the CAVSI workshop and the PECWS and are working to develop a network based on the same ideals and framework that we worked on during the PECWS.

MH: We also started a small group with the folks who were on the “addressing knowledge gaps through interdisciplinary collaboration” priority brainstorming. We want to keep in touch about working across disciplines. It makes me excited to think about what it really means to be interdisciplinary. 

SK: Yeah, absolutely, it's so easy to get stuck in our own little worlds, specialties and focus areas, but it's really hard to answer any real questions if you're not working outside of your scope of specific interest, and the interactions at the PECWS made a truly interdisciplinary approach seem much more feasible.

MH: Was there anything that came up specifically for you though the note-taking that we had to do?

SK: Yeah, some things resonated that have nothing to do with my research, except for just my visiting of these communities, especially with infrastructure. Most of these communities have had to deal with just this baseline of what housing looks like, and they’ve got to figure out how to use infrastructure that is not really well suited for high Arctic environments. There's a lot of thermal leakage, and everybody has to constantly keep up with that in the winter, while making those spaces suitable for their subsistence activities and that kind of thing. And as far as like, direct relevance to my research, just some of the examples of cooperational and interdisciplinary collaboration efforts highlighted by navigating the new Arctic approach. It's something that I don't think about as much as I probably should as someone who goes in very small groups to very remote places where there is no infrastructure oftentimes, but we're still basing ourselves out of these little towns and utilizing their resources.

MH: Yeah, there are good examples of that throughout. 

SK: Is there anything that was a big takeaway that you're gonna try to better infuse into your own work? 

MH: The importance of understanding the “why” of the research and the values that my collaborators and I bring to the research. “Why” is a point of shared understanding for developing research projects. Another thing was the variety of ways one can study and do research about the Arctic. It was a good reminder to still stay focused on the things that are most important to me and my community in Anchorage.

MH: How about for you, what are things that you're going to take forward into your future?

SK: I study plants and how they change in the Arctic. I've always wanted to somehow incorporate the needs of Indigenous communities into my work. Like, what do they want to know about the plants that they care about, and what do they want to know about how they're changing, what their range looks like, and what animals are using them, but I've never really known how to best approach a community that way and do it right. Today, during the Indigenous panel they discussed just that, which provided some got some really good ideas for how to move forward. I have some friends in Fairbanks who are part of the communities that utilize my research sites, at least in Arctic Alaska, the Athabascan, Inupiaq, and Yup’ik people who I hope will be willing to help guide me. I feel like I have the confidence now to respectfully try to integrate what they might want to know about some of their botanical cultural resources that I'm always documenting and how to make that more valuable for them. So, I’m going to try really hard to do better at that.

MH: The other thing that I will pull forward relates to my research area of housing and health.  I feel like what I saw a lot of is sort of is housing as this end point or something that needs to be solved rather than housing as part of a larger system. I was inspired to work with the network of people who are doing research all along the pathway to housing, from needs assessment, to planning and development through to construction and maintenance. 

SK: More resilience based and less damage based?

MH: Yes, exactly. And then we can identify together where the research needs are within the broader systems that connect to housing. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to repeat the research that shows how housing isn’t working.

SK: Yeah, that's great. I think it can be hard not to be lost in the doom and gloom of the state of the Arctic, especially as researchers. But there was a lot about resilience. And you know, we can't stop the trajectory of climate change necessarily. I mean, I think we still have the tools to slow it, but my hope for that is minimal. I think that there are some really good pathways for resilience, and that might be a good thing to shift focus towards a little bit more to keep some hope and continue building towards a more resilient world, where we can all survive well and even thrive even in the wake of some of the harsh realities that we're facing. So, yeah, I also realized that there's a lot of resources and tools that are really relevant to my areas of study that I haven't really incorporated in my research. 

I also realized that I could be a lot more comprehensive in answering my questions by  more often incorporating things like remote sensing, biogeochemistry, microbial ecology and even dendrochronology and many other areas where I could easily collect samples and make it a more complete story, and then also collect samples for other people that would like them but can't make it out to my weird remote field sites. 

MH: We talked about that a lot with our interdisciplinary workgroup, about sharing data across disciplines. For example, the people studying erosion using remote sensing are also picking up information related to housing structures.  You don't have to re-fly the drones for the housing if you're already flying the shoreline.

SK: Yeah, right, cool. That was something we talked about in the context of environmental sustainability and ethics, too, which was my focus group during the PECWS. These remote field trips are expensive, and they're resource intensive. If we could have some sort of database or like a working platform where different researchers could submit a distinct and easy protocol to follow, we could collect those data for each other when in the field. That would make things more sustainable and efficient. 

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