Global gateways as telecoupled human and natural systems: The emerging case of the Bering Strait.

Numerous narrow marine passages around the world serve as essential gateways for the transportation of goods, the movement of people, and the migration of fish and wildlife. These global gateways facilitate human-nature interactions across distant regions. The socioeconomic and environmental interactions among distant coupled human and natural systems affect the sustainability of global gateways in complex ways. However, the assessment and analysis of global gateways are scattered and fragmented. To fill this knowledge gap, we frame global gateways as telecoupled human and natural systems using an emerging global gateway, the Bering Strait, as a demonstration. We examine how three telecoupling processes (tourism, vessel traffic, and natural resource development) impact and are impacted by the coupled human and natural system of the Bering Strait Region. Given that global gateways share many similarities, our analysis of the Bering Strait Region provides a foundation for the assessment of other telecoupled global gateways.

North Pacific and Arctic marine traffic dataset (2015-2020).

In this paper, we present a spatially explicit dataset of monthly shipping intensity in the Pacific Arctic region from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2020. We calculated shipping intensity based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, a type of GPS transmitter required by the International Maritime Organization on all ships over 300 gross tonnes on an international voyage, all cargo ships over 500 gross tonnes, and all passenger ships. We used AIS data received by the exactEarth satellite constellation (64 satellites as of 2020), ensuring spatial coverage regardless of national jurisdiction or remoteness. Our analytical approach converted raw AIS input into monthly raster and vector datasets, separated by vessel type. We first filtered raw AIS messages to remove spurious records and GPS errors, then joined remaining vessel positional records with static messages including descriptive attributes. We further categorized these messages into one of four general ship types (cargo; tanker; fishing; and other). For the vector dataset, we spatially intersected AIS messages with a hexagon (hex) grid and calculated the number of unique ships, the number of unique ships per day (summed over each month), and the average and standard deviation of the speed over ground. We calculated these values for each month for all vessels as well as vessels subdivided by ship type and for messages from vessels > 65 feet long and traveling > 10 knots. For the raster dataset, we created a series of spatially explicit daily vessel tracks according to unique voyages and aggregated tracks by ship type and month. We then created a raster grid and calculated the total length, in meters, of all vessel tracks within each raster cell. These monthly datasets provide a critical snapshot of dynamic commercial and natural systems in the Pacific Arctic region. Recent declines in sea ice have lengthened the duration of the shipping season and have expanded the spatial coverage of large vessel routes, from the Aleutian Islands through the Bering Strait and into the southern Chukchi Sea. As vessel traffic has increased, the social and natural systems of these regions have been increasingly exposed to the risks posed by large ships, including oil spills, underwater noise pollution, large cetacean ship-strikes, and discharges of pollutants. This dataset provides scientific researchers, regulatory managers, local community members, maritime industry representatives, and other decision makers with a quantitative means to evaluate the distribution and intensity of shipping across space and through time.

The metacoupled Arctic: Human-nature interactions across local to global scales as drivers of sustainability.

The Arctic is an epicenter of complex environmental and socioeconomic change. Strengthened connections between Arctic and non-Arctic systems could threaten or enhance Arctic sustainability, but studies of external influences on the Arctic are scattered and fragmented in academic literature. Here, we review and synthesize how external influences have been analyzed in Arctic-coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) literature. Results show that the Arctic is affected by numerous external influences nearby and faraway, including global markets, climate change, governance, military security, and tourism. However, apart from climate change, these connections are infrequently the focus of Arctic CHANS analyses. We demonstrate how Arctic CHANS research could be enhanced and research gaps could be filled using the holistic framework of metacoupling (human-nature interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems). Our perspectives provide new approaches to enhance the sustainability of Arctic systems in an interconnected world.

The spatial and temporal dynamics of global meat trade networks.

Rapid increases in meat trade generate complex global networks across countries. However, there has been little research quantifying the dynamics of meat trade networks and the underlying forces that structure them. Using longitudinal network data for 134 countries from 1995 to 2015, we combined network modeling and cluster analysis to simultaneously identify the structural changes in meat trade networks and the factors that influence the networks themselves. The integrated network approach uncovers a general consolidation of global meat trade networks over time, although some global events may have weakened this consolidation both regionally and globally. In consolidated networks, the presence of trade agreements and short geographic distances between pairs of countries are associated with increases in meat trade. Countries with rapid population and income growth greatly depend on meat imports. Furthermore, countries with high food availability import large quantities of meat products to satisfy their various meat preferences. The findings from this network approach provide key insights that can be used to better understand the social and environmental consequences of increasing global meat trade.

Interactive national virtual water-energy nexus networks.

Across the globe, many regions import virtual resources to support their development. Although many researchers have studied transfers of a single virtual resource, interactions across two types of virtual resource transfer networks - energy and water, for example - have rarely been explored simultaneously. To address these knowledge gaps, we constructed and analyzed interprovincial virtual water and energy transfer networks, using China (the largest energy consumer and is undergoing severe water scarcity) as a demonstration. The results unexpectedly showed that more than 40% of provinces gained one kind of resource (either water or energy) through trade at the expense of losing the other kind of internal resource (energy or water), and 20% of provinces suffered a double loss of both water and energy. The remaining provinces gained both water and energy. Surprisingly, approximately 40% of transferred water/energy was from relatively water/energy-scarce provinces to water/energy-abundant provinces, further deepening resource inequality. Moreover, 33.3% and 26.7% of the provinces relied more on cross-border trade than on internal resources to support their water and energy consumption, respectively. Furthermore, in terms of total trade volume, 83.3% and 73.3% of provinces depended more on distant provinces via trade than adjacent ones to support their water and energy consumption, respectively. Overall, virtual water-energy networks tended to enhance each other. Trade largely shaped the nexus relationship between water and energy consumption in provinces. Our study suggests that there is an urgent need to assess multiple virtual resource networks simultaneously in other countries to uncover unintended consequences and to develop cross-sectoral and holistic policies to achieve global sustainability and human well-being.