Arctic Wildlife Finally Benefits from U.S.-Russia

Arctic Wildlife Benefits from U.S.-Russian Conservation Efforts

(Polar bears, walruses among species targeted for protection) (782)

By Domenick DiPasquale Staff Writer

Washington - From the three-kilogram snowy owl to the 30,000-kilogram gray whale, and all manner of creatures in between, wildlife in the Arctic region and elsewhere is benefitting from scientific and environmental collaboration by American and Russian scientists.

Such scientific cooperation between the two nations, which officially began at the height of the Cold War in 1972 and has continued uninterrupted through the historic ups and downs in the bilateral relationship, is providing both the United States and Russia tangible results in protecting their rich natural heritage.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) and its Russian partner, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, are the lead governmental agencies in their respective countries charged with running the joint wildlife-conservation programs. Under the work plan the nations agreed to last year for activities in 2009 and 2010, more than 80 individual conservation projects have been carried out in the United States and Russia.

"The working relationship with our Russian counterparts has continued and deepened in this period," said Peter Ward of the International Conservation Division at FWS. In an interview with America.gov, he and Steven Kohl, head of FWS' Russia and East Asia branch, explained the positive impact these projects are having on wildlife conservation.

Kohl noted that two well-known Arctic species, polar bears and walruses, are particularly threatened by global warming, which is shrinking the polar ice cap that forms their habitat.

The polar bear population that ranges between the state of Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula in the extreme northeast tip of Russia may number at present 2,000 animals or fewer. An agreement between the United States and Russia that unified their conservation and management efforts for that polar bear population took effect in 2007, providing for long-term joint programs such as habitat conservation and collection of biological information.

The agreement also created the U.S.-Russia Polar Bear Commission, composed of representatives from each nation's government and indigenous people, to set quotas for sustainable subsistence hunting of this polar bear population by the native peoples of Alaska and Chukotka. This June, the commission set that annual harvest at 58 bears. Wildlife biologists will periodically re-evaluate the quota, based on scientific study.

The legal harvest of polar bears in Chukotka, which is expected to reduce poaching, will begin only after monitoring and enforcement systems have been established there.

2010 also marked the culmination of four years' work on the Pacific walrus population in the Bering and Chukchi seas, which lie between Alaska and Siberia. Scientists had conducted an air and maritime survey of the walrus population in the region in 2006 that was the first such count since 1990. In January of this year, after an exhaustive analysis of the survey results, the walrus population was estimated to number 129,000 animals. With such detailed data, scientists are now better able to determine what conservation measures might be needed and what implications subsistence hunting might have on this walrus population.

Besides such marine mammals as polar bears and walruses, many other species in the far north have benefitted from U.S.-Russian cooperation in wildlife conservation. Projects undertaken over the past two years have been as varied as banding snowy owls on Russia's Wrangel Island, studying sea otter populations in Alaska's Glacier Bay and the northern Kuril Islands of Russia, mapping the most productive caribou calving grounds in the Northern Hemisphere, and the individual photographic identification of 172 gray whales in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Sakhalin Island to study the effect oil and gas exploration in the region may be having on the whales.

Scientists from the two nations are also collaborating on more broad-based research that focuses on such issues as ecosystem biodiversity, management of protected natural areas, and mitigation of the damage caused by invasive species of fauna and flora.

The two-way exchange of Russian and American conservation experts working in these joint projects continues not only to reap valuable scientific data but also to foster personal and professional relationships which, Kohl said, "have kept these programs going even in times when relations between our two countries were problematic."

The value of this scientific cooperation perhaps was best summed up by Amirkhan Amirkhanov, a deputy director in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, when the environmental working group of the U.S-Russian Presidential Commission met in Washington this June.

"These aren't perhaps large-scale programs, but they have been long-term and constant, and have made an impact," Amirkhanov said. They are "an irreplaceable element in cooperation between our countries."

ENDS