Institutional Responses to Climate Change: the Case of the Alaska Transportation System

Institutions managing the Alaska road,rail, airport, and marine highwaytransportation system and the pipelinecorridor are evaluated for reactions toevidence of climate change. Long-termclimate warming is not a formal criterionin the decisional process of the stateDepartment of Transportation and PublicFacilities for road and airport projects,which have a short (15–25 year) life span,but is taken into account for bridgeconstruction (50–75 year life). Short- tomid-term climate effects are considered inareas with discontinuous permafrost andaffect routing, roadbed construction, andmaintenance decisions. National standardsare amended with Alaska-specific practicesfor unique cold-weather conditions.The Federal/State Joint Pipeline Office(JPO), responsible for monitoring ofpipeline safety under the federal lease andstate grant, in 2001 developed additionalstipulations to mitigate permafrost thawingand slope instability, including a `watchlist' of 200 wobbling VSMs on theTrans-Alaska Pipeline. This action appearsmore responsive to climate change effectsthan that of any other arctic institutionstudied. It can be attributed to thespecific authority of the JPO to monitorgeotechnical conditions at present and inthe future.In general, agencies tended to adoptincremental responses to evidence ofclimate change.     

Real-time PCR assay for detection and relative quantification of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Liocarcinus </Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">depurator</Emphasis> larvae from plankton samples

Accurate species identification of decapod crustacean larvae is required to understand their population distributions, life cycle dynamics and interactions with their habitats. Analysis of plankton samples using morphological taxonomic methods and microscopy is time-consuming, requires highly skilled and trained operatives and may often be inaccurate. As complementary tools to classical identification methods, recent work has focused on the development of molecular approaches and shows their feasibility for species-specific identification. This study has developed real-time PCR assays utilising species-specific Taqman^® probes designed in the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene of Liocarcinus depurator, Necora puber, Carcinus maenas and Cancer pagurus. Our study then employed the probe and primers designed for L. depurator to obtain accurate identification and relative abundance estimates of L. depurator larvae in plankton samples collected between March 2005 and October 2006. Ranges of larval abundances were derived from a standard curve created from plankton samples spiked with a known number of larvae reared in the laboratory. Inhibition of the PCR reaction was shown to be an important factor and our results suggested that 0.1 ng of DNA as template provided accurate identification and avoided inhibition. Real-time PCR was shown to provide accurate species identification on unsorted plankton samples and could be suitable for the estimation of larval abundances in the plankton, although more work must be done to improve the accuracy of those estimations.