Thesis Watch: Jessie Christian

By Zeke Shomler

We got the chance to sit in on Jessie Christian’s M.S. Thesis defense in Geoscience on Friday morning, February 24th, 2023. Her research project, entitled, “Citizen Science: Shoreline Change Monitoring in Southwest Alaska,” took her to two sites in Dillingham and Chignik Bay where she collected data alongside coastal communities to monitor shoreline erosion and add to our understanding of the effects of climate change.

Community-Based Monitoring (CBM) includes community members in standardized monitoring efforts in collaboration with outside agencies. Jessie’s project helped create and maintain connections between research institutions and coastal communities in Bristol Bay, in addition to developing protocols to collect and organize the data. 

Bristol Bay, Jessie noted, is home to thirty-one federally recognized tribes and consists of over 40,000 square miles of land—about the size of Ohio. Being home to one of the largest salmon fisheries in the world, she explained how it’s important to understand the way coastlines are affected by global climate change through factors like declining sea ice, permafrost degradation, and sea level rise. Currently, seventy out of two hundred Alaska Native communities face “significant environmental threats,” which can lead to issues such as infrastructure damage, health risks, and interruption of subsistence lifestyles. 

Despite the importance of this information, it can often be a challenge to collect data from remote regions. Many sites are only accessible by boat, ATV, or costly plane trips, and weather conditions can often be harsh on the sensitive instruments required to make accurate measurements. Researchers also have to contend with limited baseline data sets; there’s just not enough information out there in terms of high-resolution imagery, elevation models, and pre-existing coastal surveys to be able to comprehensively analyze coastline erosion in these remote areas of Alaska.

Jessie’s project directly addresses research gaps through community-based monitoring in order to deal with these kinds of localized problems. She started by collecting baseline data in conjunction with community partners, then organized it into excel spreadsheets to create and update community erosion measurement plots, time-lapse videos, and coastal elevation profiles. Coastal elevation profiles depict 2-D topographical changes along a shoreline. She worked with locals to identify gaps in data, address specific concerns, and optimize the research process according to community needs and available resources. 

In general, there are three different ways to collect shoreline data. The first is simply to take timelapse photos along the shoreline over a long period of time to get a visual representation of changes. These timelapse videos are shared with community members, as well as on the Geoscience Lab’s YouTube channel. This method can provide helpful visual data, but is limited by weather and visibility.

The second method consists of other ways of remotely collecting data that rely on technology, such as wave buoys or drones equipped with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors. Once again, this can be interrupted by weather conditions. It also requires significant resources in terms of technology, funding, and people with the training to be able to use it.

The third method of collecting shoreline erosion data involves physically placing stakes along a shoreline and taking several measurements over time between the stakes and the eroding feature to see how this distance changes. The benefit to taking this type of measurement is that it provides a high-temporal resolution data set, and doesn’t take much training to implement. It helps get around issues involving weather and visibility, since all it requires, in Jessie’s words, is “essentially a tape measure and a wooden stick.” In comparing the stake-ranging measurements collected through this project to remote satellite data, Jessie found them to be highly accurate.

Jessie was able to incorporate all three methods of collecting data to comprehensively analyze erosion rates in Dillingham and Chignik Bay with the help of local research partners. She established and maintained connections within each community, assessed localized issues and resource availability, and helped create and implement protocols to work alongside locals in collecting and organizing shoreline data. 

Jessie also developed two separate assessment rubrics to assess how environmental and social factors influence the availability of comprehensive data at each of her research sites. With categories like “human capacity,” “personnel turnover,” “vegetation density,” and “accessibility and safety,” to name a few, the three-tiered rubrics can be used to assess CBM program efficacy.

The results of this study revealed some drastic shoreline changes due to erosion over the study period. In the Dillingham Sewage Lagoon site, for example, they measured about sixty-two feet of erosion between January 2017 and January 2022—that means the shoreline receded nearly eight feet per year. 

By involving locals in the process, rural coastal communities are given ownership of the geoscientific research and the data it produces. After the community receives data products, they can choose what to do with it based on their needs. In Nelson Lagoon, the community reached out to an engineering firm with the data and received five million dollars for a relocation feasibility study. In Chignik Bay, they’re contracting with firms to examine infrastructure, and also received a five million dollar grant to collect LiDAR in the region based on this shoreline data. In this way, Jessie’s project directly contributes to furthering the well-being and resilience of rural coastal communities as they’re faced with the effects of climate change. 

The future of this project will involve the expansion of existing data and technology, including more water sensors and wave buoys, more local weather stations,. There are also plans to expand school outreach programs to include more students from middle and high schools in the process of coastal hazard data collection. 

One of the most exciting things about this project, Jessie says, is the way it focuses on human connection. In her words, “it all starts with a conversation,” and really depends on cooperation and maintaining relationships. Through this research, local communities are given the tools and methods to create knowledge and make important decisions for themselves.