Gardening under Climate Change: Communicating and Sharing Good Practices in Arctic Cities

• In Event: Environmentalists, Spies, and Scientists: Remote Sensing in and of Eurasia I

Abstract

Remote sensing methods are among the ones that help to conduct comparative research across highly varied contexts of the world and find similarities and differences that lead to different patterns of the landscape affected by values, beliefs, land management regimes, and climate change. As the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, the latter may have more profound effects on the environment in Eurasia, which occupies 60% of the Arctic. In particular, there are optimistic scenarios about agricultural possibilities that this warming may bring to previously frozen lands. While large-scale changes are not yet visible, some gardening practices are widely discussed on social media across the Arctic. In this paper, we offer a comparison of emerging new gardening practices in three different Arctic cities: Fairbanks, AK (USA), Yellowknife (Canada), and Muravlenko & Kogalym (Russia): while the cities have quite similar climatic conditions in Fairbanks and Yellowknife, the discourse of gardeners rather emphasizes hardships of environment, in Muravlenko and Kogalym, the focus is rather on the benefits that warming climate can bring. Using analysis of remote sensing data (MODIS, Sentinel-2 and WorldView-23) and social media groups, we argue that optimism and anticipation of benefits from climate change may affect actual vegetation in the cities.

Author

• Vera Kuklina, George Washington U