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Alaska's economy and the pandemicThe Alaska economy has emerged from its longest recession in 2019. The decline in economic activity and government revenues was due to the severe decline in oil prices which resulted in deep spending cuts and significant private sector job losses. The current pandemic has resulted in a significant shock to all facets of the Alaska economy. In this paper, we provide a little bit of background on the Alaska economy, present new high frequency data to asses the extent of the current damage, and then present a forecast for the next 6, 12, and 18 months. In 2020, we anticipate the economy to end the year with almost 25,000 fewer jobs than in 2019. The decrease would represent a 7.4% relative to the previous year. In 2021, we expect the economy to slowly start regaining the jobs lost the previous year and grow at a rate of 2.2%. In 2022, we anticipate a continuing climb for the economy as it is expected to grow at 1.1% percent. By the end of 2022, the Alaska economy should be at about 95% of the pre-pandemic levels. It is important to note there are significant downside risks which could negatively influence the employment outlook.
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Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act: Selected BibliographyISER prepared this list of books, reports, and other resources on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act for the ANCSA @ 40 Committee. It is the most comprehensive such list we are aware of, but there are likely additional resources yet to be identified. Some of these resources are now out of print and may be available at used bookstores or at libraries. More recent publications can be obtained from the publishers or at bookstores. You can also find resources on websites, as noted in the citations.
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Quantifying expert opinion with discrete choice models: Invasive elodea's influence on Alaska salmonidsScientific evidence should inform environmental policy, but rapid environmental change brings high ecological uncertainty and associated barriers to the science-management dialogue. Biological invasions of aquatic plants are a worldwide problem with uncertain ecological and economic consequences. We demonstrate that the discrete choice method (DCM) can serve as a structured expert elicitation alternative to quantify expert opinion across a range of possible but uncertain environmental outcomes. DCM is widely applied in the social sciences to better understand and predict human preferences and trade-offs. Here we apply it to Alaska's first submersed invasive aquatic freshwater plant, Elodea spp. (elodea), and its unknown effects on salmonids. While little is known about interactions between elodea and salmonids, ecological research suggests that aquatic plant invasions can have positive and negative, as well as direct and indirect, effects on fish. We use DCM to design hypothetical salmonid habitat scenarios describing elodea's possible effect on critical environmental conditions for salmonids: prey abundance, dissolved oxygen, and vegetation cover. We then observe how experts choose between scenarios that they believe could support persistent salmonid populations in elodea-invaded salmonid habitat. We quantify the relative importance of habitat characteristics that influence expert choice and investigate how experts trade off between habitat characteristics. We take advantage of Bayesian techniques to estimate discrete choice models for individual experts and to simulate expert opinion for specific environmental management situations. We discuss possible applications and advantages of the DCM approach for expert elicitation in the ecological context. We end with methodological questions for future research.
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COVID-19's spring 2020 school closures: The effect on teacher candidatesIn response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Dunleavy mandated that Alaska’s K12 schools closed to in-person instruction; later, these school closures were extended until the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. Across the state, educators worked not only to ensure they met their responsibilities for instruction, but also other key school functions including parent resources, meal services, and social-emotional learning. Concurrently, senior college students in teacher licensure programs at the University of Alaska (UA) were in classrooms fulfilling their clinical experience (student teaching) requirements. During the school closures, students were still “placed” in schools, but the nature of their internship experience changed fundamentally as classes were moved to distance delivery. On March 20, Alaska’s Education Commissioner Michael Johnson announced that the state of Alaska would grant emergency certification to teachers who were unable to complete the required number of clinical placement hours due to COVID-19 school closures. Many of these new graduates will qualify for licensure, but how will the pandemic affect them as they become teachers? In this paper, we explore how teacher candidates perceive their readiness for teaching in the fall, and their career intentions. By comparing survey responses collected from spring 2020 graduates against graduates of spring 2019 (the students who had a “typical” student teaching experience), we find that the 2020 graduating class feels ready for the classroom. However, these new teachers – and those hired from teacher education programs (TEPs) outside of Alaska – will need supports as they transition to teaching.
