Resolving the changing pace of Arctic rivers

Abstract

Copyright and License

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025.

Acknowledgement

We thank the Huslia, Beaver and Alakanuk Tribal and Village Councils for river and land access, and S. Huffman, D. Dayton, C. Wiehl, K. Vanderpool, R. Williams, T. Hamilton and the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council for logistical support. The photo in Fig. 1d was provided by T. Hamilton on behalf of the Alakanuk Tribal IGAP. This work was supported by NSF Award 2127442 and Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. E.C.G. was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.

Funding

This work was supported by NSF Award 2127442 and Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. E.C.G. was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.

Data Availability

The database of riverbank boundaries digitized from Landsat satellite imagery and used to reconstruct river migration rates over the period 1972–2020 is available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15002956 (ref. ⁷⁹). Note that this study builds on an existing dataset of bank positions of n = 10 Arctic river reaches digitized in ref. ¹³. This original dataset is also available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7556050 (ref. ⁸⁰). The Landsat image archives are accessible through the USGS EarthExplorer (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/). The Supporting Information includes a complete list of Landsat scene IDs utilized in this study. The global aboveground biomass map from ref. ⁴² is available at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1763. The NDVI trend (greening versus browning) statistics from ref. ⁴¹ are available at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1576. Streamflow data are available from the USGS National Water Dashboard (https://dashboard.waterdata.usgs.gov/app/nwd/en/) and the National Hydrological Service of Canada (https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/). The remote-sensing-derived estimates of riverine suspended sediment concentrations from ref. ²⁶ are available at https://figshare.com/s/dde3bffd8e12227e2b26. The permafrost mean annual ground temperature observations are available from ref. ⁵¹ at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.930669. The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) Ice Jam Database⁴⁷ is available at https://icejam.sec.usace.army.mil/. The Alaska permafrost map of ref. ³⁶ is available at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7C53HX6.

Code Availability

The code used to perform this analysis is archived on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15002956 (ref. ⁷⁹).

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Discussion, Figs. 1–35 and Tables 1–3 (PDF)

Additional Information

Extended Data Table 1 Summary of channel migration rate trends and environmental parameters for the n = 20 sites shown in Fig. 2 

Extended Data Table 2 An extension of Extended Data Table 1 listing the variability in floodplain above-ground biomass (AGB), NDVI trend, and permafrost (PF) abundance for each river reach

Extended Data Fig. 1 Potential pitfalls of inferring changes to river migration rates from optical satellite timeseries

Extended Data Fig. 2 An illustration of how our curvature-based approach avoids overcounting the apparent channel migration from image co-registration errors

Extended Data Fig. 3 A synthetic experiment to test for bias in the extraction of migration rates from historical Landsat timeseries