Linking pan-Arctic human and physical data

The Arctic Observing Network–Social Indicators (AON-SI) project, building upon earlier work, developed an approach for linking social with physical science data across the Northern pan-Arctic. The first iteration of social data involves time series of demographic indicators in more than 100 separate regions, such as boroughs of Alaska, census divisions of Northern Canada, and oblast or autonomous regions of Northern Russia. Its geographical scope covers all of Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, along with Northern parts of Canada and Russia. Administrative subdivisions within these areas define the regions. Key features of this data framework are (1) the list of region names, (2) a unified system of numerical identification codes, and (3) a region-year organization. We approximated the geographical area of each region as a particular set of 25 × 25 km grid cells, following the Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) scheme widely used in high-latitude natural science. Physical data in this format are accessible through the Arctic RIMS website. The linkage opens doors for integrated analysis of social and natural-science data, as illustrated by an analysis of Alaska community electricity use. Current versions of the database are published online.