Membership Meeting, Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 5pm AKT

  • Posted:
  • by Editor Friends of AK NRWs

    • Wild, Outstanding, and Remarkable: Meet the Seven Wild and Scenic Rivers Flowing on Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges    

    Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 5-6pm (AKDT) 
    Jennifer Reed, Arctic Refuge and FWS Wild and Scenic Rivers Program Lead

    Recorded meeting below

    Jennifer Reed of the Arctic Refuge will bring you on an unforgettable adventure exploring each of these distinct and thriving waterways.  While Alaska’s Refuges TEEM with countless amazing rivers, the rivers Congress deemed superlative and distinct within the Alaska  Refuges include:  Andreafsky (Yukon Delta); Beaver Creek (Yukon Flats); Ivishak, Sheenjek, and Wind (Arctic Refuge); Nowitna (Nowitna Refuge); and Selawik (Selawik Refuge).  Some are great salmon highways; others host more northern species like grayling and sheefish.  Some are corridors for vast caribou migrations and all furnish important riparian habitat and travel routes for waterfowl, songbirds, furbearers and all grazing species.  People have used them as transportation corridors and food sources for millennia,  since they are within the homelands of Alaska’s indigenous peoples. Subsistence users have now been joined by  adventurers and fisherfolk seeking solitude and the joy of rivers.

    .

    Sheenjek Wild and Scenic River, Arctic Refuge (USFWS/A. Bonogofsky)

    Jennifer Reed is the national and regional Fish and Wildlife Service lead for the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program.  She has lived between the Alaska Range and the Brooks Range since finishing college and leaving Detroit for her first Alaska job as a Denali Park Ranger.  She taught school for 8 years, part of the time on Nelson Island, before developing a federal career focused on connecting people with their public lands.  Jennifer confessed that she was not initially a rivers person beginning her  love affair with landscape-meets-human as a backpacker. Dog mushing and hiking are more natural to her but she became a boater because of her dedication to relating to the visitors to the Arctic Refuge. Since then she has boated most of the major rivers in the West.  Jennifer lives in Fairbanks. 



    View Recorded Meeting: