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 Priority Region: Arctic
Staff contacts: The vast Arctic Priority Region stretches from the Seward Peninsula on the Bering Sea across the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPR-A). It continues east across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain to Canada’s Northern Yukon and MacKenzie Delta. The NPR-A includes a collection of very special wilderness resources. These include the Colville River, the Alaska North Slope’s largest watershed, which supports more than 20 fish species plus moose, wolves and grizzlies. The world’s largest breeding densities of peregrines, gyrfalcons, and rough-legged hawks are found within the river’s topography. The Teshekpuk Lake area boasts 25 percent of the world’s Pacific black brant population and the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd. The Utukok Uplands provides calving grounds for the enormous Western Arctic Caribou herd, and it hosts the highest density of grizzlies anywhere in the Brooks Range or Alaska’s coastal plain. East of NPR-A past the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the most important polar bear denning site in the US, and it is the primary calving grounds of the transboundary Porcupine Caribou Herd. These caribou spend the winter to the east and south of the Brooks Range, mainly in Canada. The easternmost portion of the Arctic Priority Region is the vast delta wetlands complex of the MacKenzie River, the longest river in Canada and the fifth longest in the world. The delta provides habitat for migrating snow geese, tundra swans and brant, and breeding habitat for other waterfowl. The Gwich'in people of Interior Alaska and Northwest Canada depend on the Porcupine Caribou Herd for food, clothing and cultural subsistence. The Inupiat and Inuvialuit people live in far northern Alaska and northwestern Canada respectively, and have strong cultural and ecological relationships to the land and to adjacent areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.
We are supporting the following organizations for work in this area. When you click on an organization name you will see a list of all grants made to that organization, which may include projects funded in other program areas. (Organizations receiving science-related grants are not included in this list. Please see our Conservation Science section for those grants.)
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