Wainwright Traditional Use Area Conservation Plan
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Traditional Use Area Maps
A series of 19 maps illustrate how a core area around the village of Wainwright is highly significant -- for both successful subsistence hunting and for the viability of several sensitive species. Read these directions for printing maps.
1. Traditional Subsistence Use Areas
2. Village of Wainwright Traditional Use Area
3. Alaska North Slope Land Management
4. Wide Ranging Species: Bowhead Whale, Brant, Caribou and Salmon
5. Traditional Use Surveys
6. Traditional Use Surveys for Key Subsistence Resources
7. Core Subsistence Fishing Areas
8. Core Subsistence Marine Mammal Areas
9. Core Subsistence Caribou Hunting Areas
10. Core Subsistence Waterfowl Hunting Areas
11. Core Subsistence Areas: Fish, Marine Mammals, Caribou and Waterfowl
12. Traditional Subsistence Travel Routes
13. Projected Climate Change
14. Sensitive Species: Birds
15. Senstitive Species: Birds, Caribou, Marine Mammals
16. Sensitive Species: Fish
17. Combined Sensitive Species
18. Combined Species & Core Subsistence Area
19. Combined Species, Core Subsistence, and NPR-A Deferral Areas
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A plan for the future. Few communities in the United States still have the ability to plan for the lands around them in advance of major development. The people of Wainwright recognized this unique and vanishing opportunity, and seized it.
Not only does the report allow the community to plan for the long-term uses of the lands they directly own, but it provides a vehicle for them to assert their values, rights and interests as the northwest portion of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska is opened for natural resource exploration and development.
The three-page executive summary lists the reports conclusions and recommendations.
Cooperation in Planning
This report is the product of four years of cooperation between the Wainwright Traditional Council and The Nature Conservancy beginning in 2003. At that time, North Slope villages were beginning to feel the direct impacts of industrial exploration, and development in their traditional use areas and around their villages. The potential economic benefits of development of natural resources within National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) are generally welcomed by the people of the North Slope, but there is concern that rapid, uncontrolled expansion of development infrastructure will harm the subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering sites, and resources around North Slope villages.
Protecting Special Places
Following a meeting attended by representatives from several North Slope villages and hosted by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, the Wainwright Traditional Council invited The Nature Conservancy to collaborate on a project to identify and protect special places within the Wainwright Traditional Use Area. The project’s start coincided with the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to defer oil and gas leasing until the year 2014 on lands in the northwest corner of the NPR-A—lands which make up the core of the traditional use area for the people of Wainwright.
The Wainwright Traditional Council saw the deferral period as an opportunity to identify important areas for subsistence and traditional activities, so that these areas could be considered in future leasing decisions. Another of the Council’s goals was to identify information gaps concerning subsistence species and recommend studies to be carried out during the deferral period. The goals of the Traditional Council meshed with the objectives of The Nature Conservancy of Alaska, which are to identify and conserve biologically important areas in Alaska through Conservation by Design. The Nature Conservancy has been engaged in conservation of important lands, waters, and wildlife of the North Slope since beginning the Alaska-Yukon Arctic Ecoregional Assessment in 2001.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Polar bears © U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Wetlands© U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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