Introduction to Water Use From Arctic Lakes: Identification, Impacts, and Decision Support 1

The arctic region has experienced considerable population and industrial growth in recent years. Growth is likely to continue as industries intensify their search for natural resources previously economically inaccessible. In much of the Arctic, permanent road infrastructure is nonexistent, so access to new natural-resource reserves is often dependent on the construction of ice roads during winter. Water used to support ice-road construction and related industrial activity is predominantly drawn from lakes, placing increased pressure on these water reserves and their associated biota. Arctic lakes spend a significant proportion of the year under ice-cover. This presents significant challenges to resource and industry managers interested in determining the suitability of arctic lakes for the purpose of water withdrawal. Although the Arctic has many lakes, many are not suitable for water withdrawal due to potential effects on aquatic biota, particularly fishes. Until recently, water-withdrawal thresholds in Alaska and northern Canada guiding the removal of water from ice-covered lakes have been largely based on experience with limited supporting measured data. As such, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how protective these thresholds are with respect to mitigating the potential risks of water use. There is a need for simple, practical methods to identify lakes that can be used for waterwithdrawal purposes and safe limits on water-use volumes. These must be based on an understanding of the potential environmental risks involved with this activity and adaptive to increased understanding of arctic-lake processes and changing climate conditions. This collection on arctic lakes contains seven papers, each focusing on different aspects of waterwithdrawal activities in support of industrial activities. The impetus for the creation of this series of papers began three years ago when several collaborating Alaska and Canadian researchers presenting at the AWRA summer specialty conference on adaptive management realized that they were dealing with various and complimentary aspects of water use in arctic lakes. While lakes in the Arctic and Subarctic have been studied in many scientific investigations, there was need to improve the understanding of arctic lakes related to current resource management challenges. These papers present topics ranging from the development of new approaches for the identification of lakes that may be suitable for water withdrawal to the impacts that water withdrawal may have on arctic lakes. Several papers focus on the chemistry in arctic lakes to improve our general understanding of the lake environment. In the first paper, White et al. (2008a) presented an approach using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery to identify lakes that contain water throughout the year, and may therefore be candidates for industrial use in the late winter. Other lakes, shown to freeze completely in winter, conversely, could be candidates for early season industrial use. These authors also noted that flooded gravel mines (also required for road construction) may serve as a good source of water for ice road construction as they often