Farming on Frost: Unveiling the Hidden World of Permafrost-Agroecosystems

Researchers from nine countries, led by Melissa Ward Jones (INE/WERC), including INE faculty members Benjamin Jones, Mikhail Kanevskiy, Benjamin Gaglioti, and Yuri Shur, have published the first global study on permafrost-agroecosystems, which are agricultural activities in areas with permafrost-affected soils. Due to the lack of detailed data on the exact locations of these systems, the study provides a proxy to identify their most likely locations.

The paper features seven case studies from the US (Alaska), Canada, Northern Fennoscandia, Russia, Mongolia, and Nepal, illustrating the complex interactions between permafrost thaw, environmental change, economies, industries, and policies. It highlights commonalities between these case studies, especially the knowledge gaps related to permafrost and the broader observations of environmental changes impacting agricultural activities. Finally, the study offers recommendations for policymakers.

Figure above: The upper row shows historic air photos from 1951, 1984, and 2007 (United States Geological Survey Earth Explorer) that illustrate the expansion of agricultural fields of a farm in Fairbanks, Alaska. The expansion of agricultural fields removed the native insulating vegetation and exposed the underlying permafrost to climate-driven thaw. The lower row shows that this permafrost proved to be ice rich from up to 1.05 m of subsidence measured between 2011 and 2017 from Light Detection and Ranging datasets (Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys).

Socio-ecological dynamics of diverse global permafrost-agroecosystems under environmental change. Ward Jones, M., Habeck, O.H., Ulrich, M., Crate, S., Gannon, G., Schwoerer, T., Jones, B., Kanevskiy, M., Baral, P., Maharjan, A., Steiner, J., Spring, A., Price, M.J., Bysouth, D., Forbes, B.C., Verdonen, M., Kumpula, T., Strauss, J., Windirsch, T., Poeplau, C., Shur, Y., Gaglioti, B., Parlato, N., Tao, F., Turetsky, M., Grand, S., Unc, A., and Borchard, N. (2024). Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, 56(1).