Food Systems in Focus as New Ambassadors Program Launches
The first-ever cohort of Alaska CASC Ambassadors will lead three new research projects on invasive European green crab, Kodiak Island’s food systems, and mariculture policy.
The three research projects selected to represent the inaugural Ambassadors Program — the Alaska CASC’s newest research initiative — are officially underway.
Grounded in Ketchikan, Kodiak, and Southeast Alaska’s Tribal communities, each one-year project will center food security through a different lens: invasive species education, mapping local food systems, and marine policy. Over the next 12 months, the four Ambassadors will lead a variety of interviews, classes, and workshops while creating outreach materials, white papers, and community assessments.
“These projects highlight that wild foods and food security are top-of-mind topics in Alaska’s communities,” says Micah Hahn, a co-principal investigator with the Alaska CASC and the Ambassadors Program lead advisor.
The Ambassadors Program was created last year “to conduct activities to support work related to climate adaptation and to engage in the AK CASC community.” It was particularly important, Hahn says, to strengthen connections between the CASC and the University of Alaska’s rural and satellite campuses. The primary goal of these grants is to build relationships and trust with state, federal, Tribal, and community partners — a crucial first step that will allow the Ambassadors to continue their meaningful work into the future.
Each project is led by a University of Alaska faculty member who receives $20,000 in grant funding. The application pool for the inaugural cohort was strong, Hahn says, and she hopes interest will grow during the call for the 2026 program, slated to open this summer.
“I love meeting new people and strengthening the network of climate researchers and practitioners in Alaska,” Hahn says. “I’m excited about the potential for the Ambassadors Program to spark new collaborations and get projects off the ground that will support communities with issues affecting their daily lives.”
Boosting European Green Crab Education
In July 2022, while walking the beaches at the Annette Islands Reserve in Metlakatla, NOAA fisheries partners made a shocking discovery: European green crabs, identified in Alaska for the very first time.
The finding sparked immediate concern from commercial and subsistence harvesters. Having already spread to shores in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, the species had demonstrated their potential to wreak havoc on native shellfish, salmon, and eelgrass populations.
Nearly three years later, efforts to monitor and limit the spread of European green crabs across Southeast Alaska have garnered great enthusiasm. Alaska Sea Grant, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), the Metlakatla Indian Community, the Ketchikan Indian Community, and the Alaska Invasive Species Program are just a few of the partners working to eradicate the invasive shellfish.
Barbara Morgan and Charmaine Lewis, both biologists and professors at the University of Alaska Southeast’s Ketchikan campus, have worked closely with these organizations, as well as crab-curious community members. But during these collaborations, they’ve noticed an imbalance between public excitement and understanding — a gap they hope their new project will bridge.
“There’s a lot of people who want to help, but don’t know what European green crabs look like,” Morgan says. “We’d like to help people learn how to recognize the European green crab, and how they can be part of the solution.”
Some of the biggest confusion about the crabs stems from their name. Contrary to popular thought, not all green-colored crabs are European green crabs, and not all European green crabs are green. As a result, on color alone, it is trickier than it seems for the average person to distinguish between invasive and native crab species — including graceful, shore, or kelp crabs.
As Alaska CASC Ambassadors, Morgan and Lewis will create informational handouts to educate community members on the non-color characteristics that set European green crabs apart from other local crabs — three raised bumps between their eyes, and five big spines on either side of the front of their carapaces — and the differences between dead crabs and shed carapaces one is likely to find on the beach. Later in the summer, they plan to lead in-person classes in Ketchikan to solidify this learning.
Widespread misidentification is currently a major factor in Alaska’s existing ban on harvesting or killing European green crabs. At the current level of awareness — through no fault of any community — people would likely inadvertently kill native crabs if the ban wasn’t in place. On the eastern U.S. coast, where invasive European green crabs have lived for decades and community members can more readily identify them, harvested crabs are stimulating the economy by being turned into dog treats, fertilizer, and even whiskey.
Reaching that stage in Alaska, Lewis says, starts with outreach. “Our hope is to be accessible to a wide audience,” she says. “If we can communicate the science of the European green crab to the average person, it will be pretty powerful.”
Envisioning Kodiak’s Food Future
Sean Kelly, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Coastal Resilience Specialist with the Alaska Sea Grant program, is supporting the Kodiak Area Native Association (KANA) to create a Kodiak Food System Vulnerability Assessment — one of the first of its kind in Alaska.
The assessment will bring the health of the archipelago’s food systems into focus, considering both locally grown foods — those nurtured in backyards, greenhouses, and community gardens — and wild harvests. Currently, the team is drafting a community survey meant to better understand individuals’ priorities and experiences. It will be sent to a local network of garden managers, growers, harvesters, and others in the Kodiak Region. Over the next two months, Kelly and KANA are planning to gather the results and share synopses at a workshop at the 2025 Alaska Food Festival and Conference, held in Kodiak in late March.
Kelly says that the workshop, still being designed, will be more of a “visioning exercise” than a formal presentation of the survey findings. “We want to know the food future Kodiak community members would like to see,” he says. “We want to ask: ‘What’s missing in the survey? What else should we be thinking about?’ In addition to assessing food system vulnerability and project feasibility, we’re hoping to capture what community members are hoping for and envisioning through actionable initiatives.”
With the support of the Alaska CASC, Kelly aims to incorporate relevant indicators derived from climate projections in the food vulnerability assessment. He sees the Scenarios Network for Arctic Planning’s Garden Helper Tool, for example, as one way to integrate climate projections into growers’ future planning. The assessment will include action items or priority initiatives; he hopes people feel empowered, with tools at their disposal, to take those next steps. Kelly also expects that community and regional feedback will inform the development of additional climate products, designed to address the more location-specific questions that growers and wild food harvesters have.
“We’re trying to think generationally,” Kelly says. “The superpower of adaptation planning is that you’re thinking beyond the typical short term grant cycle. You’re thinking more deeply about future generations.”
Also partnering with KANA are the Kodiak Harvest Co-Op, Kodiak Archipelago Leadership Institute, and ADF&G.
Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into Marine Policy
Hekia Bodwitch’s passion for rural well-being has led her across the world many times over — into New Zealand’s Maori fisheries, the Canadian Arctic, and California’s cannabis landscape, in just the past few years.
But no matter where she stands on the globe, the mission at the heart of her work has remained the same. Understanding the impacts of policy on community development, she says, is crucial to advancing local sustainability and conservation efforts.
After a recent move to Juneau, Bodwitch is now an assistant professor of marine policy at the University of Alaska Southeast. As a CASC Ambassador this year, she hopes to make the relationship between Tribal fisheries in Southeast Alaska — the harvesting of salmon, hooligan, clams, and other species — and the state and federal laws which dictate these activities, like harvest limits and timing, more transparent.
“Policy makers have mandates to consider the best available science in their decision making,” Bodwitch says. “But science has historically been seen as distinct from Indigenous Knowledge. The two have been categorized differently in ways that have, at times, served to minimize the value of Indigenous Knowledge.”
From a Tribal perspective, this legacy of erasure is one of several factors underpinning the mistrust of management decisions which impact community members’ kitchen tables and bottom lines. But Bodwitch hypothesizes that policymakers may actually want to incorporate Indigenous Knowledge into policy. It’s the rigidity of current lawmaking standards, though — which Tribal communities might not be aware of — that prevent them from doing so.
Bodwitch hopes to dig into this complex dichotomy by interviewing Alaska policy makers and advisors about these barriers, then sharing what she learns with Tribal communities in Southeast Alaska. At minimum, she hopes to facilitate learning. But most ideally, she sees the year’s work as a way to kickstart future marine policy collaborations, ultimately ensuring that Indigenous Knowledge is centered, at last, in decisions.
“I know through experience that I’m much more valuable when I have something to bring to the table,” she says. “My goal is to have information that I can bring to conversations with Tribes in the future, to facilitate the development of projects.”