Alaska
Beaver expansion into Alaska’s Arctic tundra presents problems for people – and opportunities • Arkansas Advocate
When Cyrus Harris first saw a beaver during a camping trip in the tundra territory in the far northwest of Alaska in 1988, the discovery created a stir in his hometown of Kotzebue.
“That made big news then,” he said. He and his companions removed the beaver, which was near Cape Krusenstern just north of the Bering Strait, above the Arctic Circle and, until recently, far north of the Alaska tree line. When they heard about the beaver, Harris said, local Inupiat elders issued a warning that more would appear: “They’re coming, and that’s what’s going to be happening.”
The presence of beavers in the Arctic landscape around Kotzebue is no longer news. The beaver population, previously not an Arctic feature, has exploded in that region – and quickly transformed the landscape.
That transformation was summarized at a workshop in late February at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where scientists and community residents shared research findings and observations.
In a 100-square-kilometer area near Kotzebue — just under 40 square miles — the number of beaver dams jumped from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, according to UAF research presented at the beginning of the three-day workshop. The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation-funded program called the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, or A-BON. On a wider area of the Baldwin Peninsula, the number went from 94 in 2010 to 409 in 2019. Across a wider area of Arctic Northwest Alaska, their presence went from nothing in the 1950s, as shown in aerial photos, to more than 11,300 beaver ponds identified through satellite imagery by 2019, according to the UAF scientists. The presence of beaver ponds in that region more than doubled between 2004 and 2017, the scientists found.
Satellite images that have tracked beaver expansion over time clearly show not just the number of dams but their drastic impacts, said Ken Tape, the UAF ecology professor who is leading the A-BON program. He pointed to one site as an example. “It basically changes from a little stream into a sprawling wetlands,” he said.
The proliferation of beavers is attributed to the northward spread of woody plants that they eat and use for their dams and lodges.
While climate change has enabled beavers to live farther north, the animals are exacerbating the effects of Arctic climate change. Through their dam and lodge engineering, they are inundating some areas with water, speeding up permafrost thaw. Elsewhere, they are drying out areas.
Effects of climate change were already underway on the tundra landscape, with permafrost warming and lakes expanding or draining and woody shrubs growing bigger and farther north, but those were relatively gradual – until the new arrivals began engineering the landscape, Tape said.
“All of a sudden, the beaver shows up. It’s like, wham, just night and day, completely different,” he said.
‘Tundra Be Dammed’
Tape, who got into beaver studies when he and UAF permafrost expert Ben Jones were tracking climate change effects on the tundra, has now become a leading authority on the animals’ northward expansion. A famous study that he led, published in 2018, described the phenomenon in Northwest Alaska and bore a catchy title: Tundra Be Dammed.
Beavers can be as disruptive to the tundra ecosystem as wildfires are, Tape and his colleagues have concluded.
Beaver presence in Arctic Alaska largely stops at the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, leaving the North Slope largely beaver-free – for now. There are some exceptions discovered recently: a beaver pond complex that was found on the Kongakut River, which flows through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near the Canadian border, and some chew marks and tracks left by beavers on the Killik River, which flows from a point in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve into the bigger Colville River.
But that North Slope situation is expected to change, Tape said. Projections are that if the climate continues its current warming trend and shrubs continue spreading north, beavers will follow, moving down the northern side of the divide to establish themselves across the entire North Slope by century’s end, he said. “They’re poised to swim downstream,” he said.
For many residents, their animals’ new presence is a serious problem.
“We’re surrounded by beaver lodges,” said Ralph Ramoth of Selawik, an Inupiat village about 90 miles east of Kotzebue.
Beaver structures have blocked access to traditional areas for duck hunting and berry-picking, and they’ve created barriers on creeks where fish used to spawn, Ramoth said. They have affected water quality as well, he said.
“When I was young, you used to be able to drink the water out of the river. Nowadays you don’t,” he said. Those who try, he said, get stomach distress. “People call it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, referring to the unpleasant intestinal infection caused by the parasite giardia.
Beaver sins
There is a long litany of observed or suspected beaver sins in their new Arctic territory that were discussed at the workshop.
Their dams can be insurmountable barriers to fish, particularly to the whitefish that are important subsistence foods but not particularly strong swimmers. That affects people who depend on those fish for their diets – and reverberates through the food web in ways that might seem surprising. Belugas in Arctic waters, for example, depend on whitefish populations that might be harmed by new beaver presence.
As articulated by Ramoth and by residents of Canada’s Northwest Territories who attended the workshop, beaver structures can impede travel, blocking boat routes long used in the summer and turning once-dependable winter ice-travel routes into danger zones.
Deteriorated water quality is a widespread concern; Harris noted that beaver complexes are plentiful just upstream of the reservoir that is the drinking-water source for Kotzebue.
There are potentially longer-term and wider-ranging effects as well.
By speeding permafrost thaw, they are hastening the release of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists said. That is because permafrost holds organic material accumulated over thousands of years that, through freeze, is resistant to decomposition, said Michael Loranty, an associate professor of geography at Colgate University in New York.
“But when you start thawing that out, it starts decomposing,” he said at the workshop. “And if, you know, you’re kind of putting all that permafrost carbon in the bank slowly over tens of thousands of years and then you thaw it out very quickly, it’s kind of a big pulse, potentially, into the atmosphere.”
There is evidence that such pulses are already underway. Work led by UAF researcher Jason Clark detected hotspots of methane emissions from Northwest Alaska beaver ponds. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and is known to be produced from permafrost thaw. The discovery of “is an example of a new disturbance regime, wrought by an ecosystem engineer, accelerating the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said the 2023 study, which was coauthored by Tape, Jones and others at UAF, along with scientists from the National Park Service and the California Institute of Technology.
There are related effects. Though studies are preliminary, there is evidence that beavers are contributing to higher mercury levels in the water systems – and thus in fish populations. Permafrost thaw releases natural elemental mercury that is stored in frozen peat, and beavers stimulate that thaw.. Additionally, the beavers may be inadvertently helping to convert that elemental mercury into methylmercury, the form that is most dangerous to people and animals.
“Beavers bring a lot of wood to streams,” Matthew Mervyn, a graduate student who is studying the question in Canada’s Northwest Territories, said at the workshop. “Since the water slows down, it introduces more bacteria to methyl-ize the mercury.”
Mervyn, with Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, is part of a Canadian-British program called Beavers and Socio-ecological Resilience in Inuit Nunangat, or BARIN. It focuses on the Arctic region of the Northwest Territories. There, Indigenous hunters were the first to document colonization of the Beaufort Sea coast by beavers, with the animals spotted in 2008 and 2009.
The benefits of beavers
But there is another side of beavers in the Arctic.
“If I had a T-shirt, it would say, ‘I love beavers.’ I love them. They’re the best things in the world,” Lance Kramer, one of only about three Kotzebue residents who regularly trap beavers, said at the workshop.
He acknowledged that many of his Kotzebue neighbors greeted the news of beaver presence with the expression “Aiee,” a somewhat untranslatable Inupiaq expression of alarm and annoyance.
Kramer, in contrast, has taken advantage of the new arrivals. When he traps a fat beaver, he can use it for meat. The meat from skinny beavers goes to his dog, he said. He is making money selling the pelts. He has created his own detailed map of beaver lodges in the area, with names like “Faceplant Place Lodge” “About Time Lodge” and “Mad Snowman Lake Lodge,” the latter so named because his son became so annoyed about waiting for him to show up there that he built a snowman with an angry face.
He has even taken his love of beavers to show business, albeit subtly. He was an actor in the Alaska-based HBO series True Detective: The Night Country, and in a tense scene where his character brandishes a gun at law enforcement officers, he is wearing a beaver hat made by his mother-in-law.
Kramer brought up other beaver benefits. Aside from supplying meat, fur and income, beavers make it easier for him to hunt or trap other animals that gather at the structures, like wolverines and minks. “You can get everything at a beaver lodge. It’s a one-stop shop,” he said.
Evidence, mostly from outside of Alaska, shows that beaver lodges and dams can create habitat for other species, from insects to birds to predators. Research into that is continuing through the A-BON program; one project, explained by UAF graduate student Sebastian Zavoico, is using sound recorders to track bird diversity at recently established Alaska beaver sites.
While many Arctic residents are leery about the impacts of beaver dams and lodges to fish, evidence gathered to date paints a mixed picture.
In the Lower 48, where many riparian systems have been damaged by development, beavers are often considered restorers. Numerous studies there have found that beaver colonization is good for fish.
In Alaska, where study of the beaver-fish relationship is just starting, the evidence is that the animals have been positive influences in some spots and negative in others, according to information presented at the conference by UAF graduate student William Samuel. He has been tracking the relationship between beavers and Arctic grayling – and the relationship between beavers, grayling and wildfire. Within Interior Alaska, he found strong evidence that beaver densities increased in burned areas and that the combination of beavers and fires could be bad for grayling.
But the presence of beavers can make forested areas resistant to fires, too. Dammed areas can serve as fire breaks and help speed ecosystem recovery after wildfires, research in the Lower 48 has found.
The “beaver fever” name notwithstanding, beavers may not be as responsible as people think for giardia infections, said Glynnis Hood, an environmental science professor at the University of Alberta. “Beavers always get the rap, but humans carry giardia, too, and they don’t always clean up after themselves,” she said at the workshop.
Entrenched in the tundra landscape?
Future action on beavers might address both negative and positive aspects, suggested Andy Bassich of Eagle, an Interior community near the Canadian border.
“I don’t want, really, to use the word ‘infestation,’ but in some people’s minds that’s the appropriate word,” he said. In his region, where beavers have long been established, the animals have become a good source of food that substitutes for traditional food sources like salmon that are in short supply, he said.
If people want to get rid of “nuisance beavers” that might be blocking fish passage or creating other problems, perhaps there should be some kind of combined economic and cultural program that trains young people to hunt and trap them, process them, tan the hides, providing both meat and income, Bassich said.
Whatever Alaskans and Arctic residents decide to do about them, beavers may be in the far north for good.
That was a lesson imparted by Lennie Emaghok, an elder from Tuktoyaktuk, a Northwest Territories Inupiat community on the Beaufort Sea coast.
He recounted how in 2020, along a relatively short stretch of creek, he and others found 10 beaver structures and quickly removed most of them, including one that was particularly towering.
“When we returned three days later, the dam was built back, as if we had never touched it,” he said.
Hood summarized the power of the wood-chomping rodent. “Never underestimate a beaver,” she said.
Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: [email protected]. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The first day of digital integration for Hawaiian and Alaska Airlines services brought few major problems for travelers.
A new app was launched, and now travelers can find all the support on one platform.
“We successfully transitioned over to our new single passenger service system, which for guests, it means that you can book on the same system, you can manage and check in on the same system,” Hawaiian Airlines Hawaii Marketing Managing Director Alisa Onishi said.
Customers are being told to get their boarding passes on the app before arriving at the airport. And when you do get there, checked bag tags can be printed at the kiosks.
“Ninety percent of our guests already were checking in, before they got to the airport, but just a few that it’s new to them, arriving to the airport with your boarding pass is the best way,” Onishi added.
The company says the separate brands are being maintained. Aside from a few travelers who struggled with checking in online, overall, it was a smooth transition.
“It works. I usually fly Alaska and Hawaiian, so it works the same way as the Alaska did,” New York-bound passenger Kelsey Dean said. “We checked our bags. It only took a minute or two.”
Visiting sisters Gonna and Lara Severin from Holland required additional assistance, but didn’t mind the extra step.
“Not very big troubles. We weren’t able to check in online. Maybe it was because we have some extra bags, so maybe that was the problem and because we did some shopping, so maybe it’s our own fault,” they said. “We’re OK with it. It’s not a long line. People are here to help, so yeah, we really enjoyed our holiday.”
For customers who require additional help, agents are available in the terminals.
Copyright 2026 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
JUNEAU, Alaska (ALASKA BEACON) – With only four weeks left of the legislative session, the Senate Judiciary Committee has merged several bills into a wide-ranging omnibus crime bill. Even with the tight timeline, some lawmakers are optimistic about its chances for passage before the end of the session, Corinne Smith with the Alaska Beacon reports.
The new draft omnibus crime package combines ten bills ranging from raising the age of consent to increasing criminal penalties for AI-generated child sexual abuse material into one large bill supporters hope will have the momentum to pass both the House and the Senate in the next 28 days.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, introduced the 55-page omnibus bill on Friday, saying the bills have a stronger prospect as a package.
“I think that increases the likelihood we’ll be able to pass it,” he said in an interview on Monday.
With one month to go in the second year of the two-year legislative cycle, this is the last opportunity for bills to be passed by the 34th Legislature.
The draft omnibus crime bill was added to House Bill 239, sponsored by House Majority Leader Rep. Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage, who spoke in support at the hearing on Friday.
“This bill has grown, it’s gone from the sports car to the school bus” he said. “Policies I all support as a bill sponsor.”
Gov. Mike Dunleavy sponsored two bills included in the omnibus package, but did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The bills included are in various stages. Some have passed the House, while others are being considered by various committees in the House and Senate. Several lawmakers who sponsored bills now included in the omnibus package agreed that politically it could increase chances of passage by May 20.
Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, sponsored a bill that would create state felony penalties for AI-generated child sexual abuse material. It unanimously passed the House last month.
“I’m excited that it’s included in the omnibus bill, because that shows intent by the Senate to pass the bill,” Vance said on Monday. “So I have great confidence that it will cross the finish line.”
But Claman, who is running for governor, has drawn public criticism for the process of how the omnibus crime bill was put together this session.
Advocates for raising the age of consent — along with the Anchorage Daily News editorial board — criticized Claman for holding a bill to raise the age of consent to 18 in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which passed unanimously by the House last year, in order to be included in the omnibus bill. Critics urged Claman and the committee to pass the bill and allow it to move forward as a stand alone bill toward a full Senate vote and final passage.
Claman has argued that despite limited time left in the session, the bills included have been vetted and the combination package will garner more support among legislators and the governor to pass in the last few weeks of the session.
“I’ve been in the Legislature now since 2015, and so in the last 11 years, we’ve passed 11 different bills relating to public safety,” he said. “So I think there are ten different measures that we put into the bill, and if we tried to do them all individually, probably wouldn’t get them all passed.”
Claman pointed to an omnibus crime bill, House Bill 66, enacted in 2024, with support from Gov. Mike Dunleavy and across political affiliations. “That’s certainly, I think, the best example,” he said. “So I do have confidence we’ll get it passed.”
Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, sponsored House Bill 101, the bill that would raise the age of consent from 16 to 18 years old. Backed by advocates for sexual violence prevention, he said the change in law is essential for protecting teens from sexual exploitation and abuse. Under current law, it’s legal for an adult to have sex with a 16 or 17 year old. But when they are assaulted, teens must prove that they did not consent.
Despite previous disagreement and pushing for a stand alone bill, Gray said Monday he will back the omnibus crime bill in order to see the law changed.
“If that happens, inside an omnibus crime package that has other bills that are also worthy of passage, I’m fine with that,” he said. “I just want the policy to change.”
The draft omnibus crime bill now contains ten bills that previously stood alone:
- House Bill 239 — would increase criminal penalties for hit and run incidents so that drivers that cause a death and knowingly failing to stop and render assistance, and establishes mandatory sentencing of four to seven years for a first hit and run felony conviction
- House Bill 101 — would raise the age of consent from 16 to 18 years old, with provisions to allow consent to sex with someone up to six years older than them. The draft bill also allows 16 and 17 year olds to consensually exchange sexual or explicit messages within the six year close-in-age gap without penalties.
- Senate Bill 247 — would create state criminal penalties for creating AI-generated images or video that depicts sexually explicit or obscene content involving anyone under 18 years old
- House Bill 62 — Sponsored by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the bill would establish a statewide tracking system for sexual assault examination kits, expedite processing times, and ensure that survivors can privately monitor the status of their own kit.
- Senate Bill 100 — Also sponsored by the governor, and would establish the crime of organized theft, including mail theft and medical record theft
- House Bill 242 — would redefine criminal law to prohibit any sexual contact or assault by a health care worker during professional treatment, changing the current law which only applies to patients being unaware of sexual contact or assault for criminal charges to apply.
- Senate Bill 17 — would establish the crime of airbag fraud for knowingly selling, installing or manufacturing a counterfeit airbag in a vehicle
- House Bill 81 — would establish minor marijuana related convictions to remain confidential on individuals personal records, under certain criteria
- House Bill 384 — would expand confidentiality agreements between victims and service providers by updating the definition of “victim counseling center” to include tribal organizations
- Senate Bill 233 — would reassign the Controlled Substances Advisory Committee from being administered by the Department of Law to the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development.
The new version of Vance’s bill focused on AI-generated child sexual abuse material included in the bill is closer to her initial proposal. Social media controls for minors added by the House were stripped out of the Senate version. Vance said she supports the amended version given First Amendment protections around social media.
“I think that was a wise decision right now, because Alaskans are very mixed on how they feel that we should address social media,” Vance said.
Rep. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, is the sponsor of House Bill 242, and said she supports her bill being included in the Senate omnibus, but she is still pushing to advance her standalone bill in the House.
“I need people who didn’t serve on the two committees that heard it in the House to understand it,” she said, as the Senate draft will come back to the House for a concurrence vote. “It still helps to educate on the issue.”
Hannan’s legislation follows a high profile case in Juneau last year where the court dropped several charges against a chiropractor because under current law part of the legal definition of sexual assault by a medical provider requires the alleged victim to be unaware the assault is happening.
“Right now, the victim needs to be unaware, and the perpetrator needs to know that they are unaware,” Hannan said Tuesday. “So to change that in statute, I think is an important policy statement for us to make.”
Hannan said significant policy bills typically take several years to get through the Legislature, with public input, debate and support gathering. But she expressed confidence in the support for the omnibus crime bill in the weeks ahead.
“We’re running the clock down,” she added. “The only downside, from my perspective, is the advocates and the victims that were directly involved in the case that inspired this bill. You know, they get more acknowledgement when it’s the standalone bill… But in the end, if the goal is to change the policy, there’s no downside to it.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee will continue to hold hearings on the crime bill this week and its members have until Friday to introduce amendments before it advances to the Senate floor for a vote. Claman said he expects that to be in the last week of April.
This story has been republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.
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HONOLULU (KHON2) — It’s the biggest milestone yet in the Hawaiian Airlines merger with Alaska Airlines.
Starting Wednesday, April 22, Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska will operate as one, powered by a single passenger reservation system, essentially the technology behind your entire travel experience.
“The system that connects all of the programs that our guests use, things like our websites, our app, our Atmos rewards program, our Huaka’i program, all of those systems, including employee tools, will be updated as of tomorrow to a more modern single passenger service system that will allow a more stream streamlined and seamless guest experience for all those that are traveling on either Alaska or Hawaiian that will allow a more stream streamlined and seamless guest experience for all those that are traveling on either Alaska or Hawaiian,” said Alisa Onishi, Hawaiian Airlines Marketing Manager.
By midnight tonight, the Hawaiian app goes dark, replaced by a new combined Alaska-Hawaiian platform, marking a major shift in how you book and manage your flights.
“If you download our new single Alaska-Hawaiian app, you’ll be able to manage your bookings all in one place, make changes, cancellations and a lot more self-service features that our guests have been asking us for for quite some time now that you couldn’t do on the old app,” said Onishi.
Behind the scenes, this moment has been three years in the making. Alaska announced its $1.9 billion acquisition back in 2023, with approvals and integration steps unfolding through 2024 and 2025.
At the airport, much will look the same, but the process is getting an upgrade. Travelers are encouraged to check in ahead of time, using the new app, then use updated bag tag stations to print tags and drop bags faster.
“You scan your boarding pass, prints out the bag tags. You can pay or prepay online or pay at the stations and then drop your bag, so you’ll get through the airport a lot quicker,” said Onishi.
Airline officials said the goal is a more seamless, self-service experience, something customers have been asking for.
Still, not everyone is convinced.
“Even today, when I was trying to get my boarding passes, there was a Hawaiian-Alaskan app that I went to, and then it referred me back to the Hawaiian app. So I didn’t know what application I was supposed to be using, but ultimately, it worked out to a point,” said Ethan Christensen, who was standing in line at customer service to confirm his flight for tomorrow. “But yeah, we’ll see. Hopefully, it gets better. I mean, I know these things take time, especially when you’re kind of merging two big things like this, but the outlook is positive for me because I know it’s a good airline. Hopefully it stays that way.”
The call centers are not going away, and customer service desks will remain at the airports for those who need one-on-one help.
Airline leaders acknowledge the transition so far hasn’t been perfect, but said this milestone is meant to fix many of those issues.
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