The 311 Podcast

S2 E6 - Data and Discovery in the Arctic with Tom Henheffer

• Tom Henheffer • Season 2 • Episode 6

Share episode

Today, my guest is Tom Henheffer.  Tom is the CEO of the Arctic Research Foundation, a non profit organization that facilitates data collection in Canada's Arctic region.

The Arctic Research Foundation is an essential ingredient in Canada's civil society, working alongside universities, government, indigenous communities, and industry to build our understanding of this critical global region through research and data collection.

The work that Tom and the Arctic Research Foundation does is challenging in logistics, environment, and cultural context,  but it's essential and inspiring.

The public sector involves those that work for and within government, but also the many para government organizations that work around and alongside formal government bodies.  Without the work of the Arctic Research Foundation, Canada would be limited in its ability to understand the future issues facing the Arctic, as well as limited in its ability to maintain claims of territorial sovereignty.

-----

Guest information:

Tom Henheffer LinkedIn

For more information about the Arctic Research Foundation check out our website Arcticresearchfoundation.ca and ArcticFocus.org (their publishing platform). You can also connect with ARF on LinkedIn.

Resource Links:

Location Information Courtesy Wikipedia:

This is a show about the people that make digital public service work. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co/311-podcast/

We're going to keep having conversations like this. If you've got ideas of guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co.

Northern LinkedIn

Paul Bellows:

This is the 311 Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Bellows. This is a show about the people that make digital work for the public service. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co. Today, my guest is Tom Henheffer. Tom is the CEO of the Arctic Research Foundation, a non profit organization that facilitates data collection in Canada's Arctic region. The Arctic Research Foundation is an essential ingredient in Canada's civil society, working alongside universities, government, indigenous communities, and industry to build our understanding of this critical global region through research and data collection. I should set a little context here. Canada is really big. Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass, larger than the U. S., China, Brazil, or Australia. Canada is roughly three times larger than India. Non Canadians may be familiar with Canada's ten provinces, but less familiar with our three territories, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. These three territories alone count for nearly 40 percent of Canada's total landmass, including all of the regions of Canada above the Arctic Circle. However, the population of this region is less than one-half percent of Canada's 40 million residents. It's a massive area with very few people. The Arctic has enormous economic potential, with abundant rare earth elements, diamonds, gold, base metals, oil, and gas. The Arctic also provides the possibility of commercial shipping routes, deep water ports, and environmental tourism. There are many interested parties in the Arctic region. But the Arctic is also the traditional home of the many Inuit people who have thrived in these regions since time immemorial. Canada as a nation is on a journey of reconciliation with Indigenous communities after too many years of forced relocation, residential schools, and broken treaties. The work that Tom and the Arctic Research Foundation does is challenging in logistics, environment, and cultural context, but it's essential and inspiring. The public sector involves those that work for and within government, but also the many para government organizations that work around and alongside formal government bodies. Without the work of the Arctic Research Foundation, Canada would be limited in its ability to understand the future issues facing the Arctic, as well as limited in its ability to maintain claims of territorial sovereignty. Here's my conversation with Tom Henheffer.

Tom :

My name's Tom Henheffer. I'm the CEO of the Arctic Research Foundation. Our head office is in Gjoe Haven. Nunavut, but I'm based in Toronto and basically we exist to do good in the North by facilitating community led science, infrastructure, and economic development projects. And the way that we do that is we go into communities, when we're invited. We spend lots of time, put boots on the ground, do lots of consultations, build collaborations, find out what community priorities are, and then act as a catalyst and bring in other nonprofit organizations, universities, research institutes, government departments to find funding and deliver on those programming priorities. What that looks like is we were actually originally founded in 2011 to help in the search for the Franklin Expedition trip, the HMS Erebus and Terror. And we did about 80% of the search for the Erebus and then located the Terror. We were led to the Terror by a local hunter trapper from Gjoe Haven named Sammy Kogvik who we had earned their trust. For 160 years people were trying to find these ships, but no one ever listened to the Inuit. So this really informed everything that we did moving forward because we realized these guys know way more then we do, they know the land. We need to listen to them. And so we earned their trust. Sammy led us to the Terror, and from there our mandate has expanded massively into what I just mentioned. Our board realized that there was a huge lack of research infrastructure in the Arctic, especially in the near shore Marine, and remote terrestrial areas. So we have the only fleet of near shore capable research vessels in the Arctic. We have five steps right now that are purchasing a sixth. They range in size from about 25 feet up to 175 feet. And they do all kinds of work: oceanography; hydrography. So mapping the seabed for navigation, and for installing fiber optic cables, power cables, sediment sampling, core sampling, dissolve minerals, gas analysis, fixed stock assessments, mammal research. Then we also have mobile labs solar and wind powered mobile labs. They're built outta shipping containers with solar and wind either mounted on them or in arrays off to the side. They can also be hooked up to the grid. And we have 18 of them deployed across the Arctic right now. They're used in everything from dentistry and storing human medical samples and water sampling in Inuvik,to sun cracking in Cambridge Bay, to testing the thermal tolerance of Arctic char. So they have a salt water tank where you can adjust the temperature to

see how how fish react

Tom :

in Byron Bay and Finlayson Island. But our biggest installation is actually is our head office. It's called Naurvik, which is Inuktuk for the growing place. It's in Gjoe Haven and is eight of our labs daisy chained together where eight local technicians who are hired and employed by the Arctic Research Foundation from the community, are growing crops. Tomatoes, and lettuce, and potatoes, and strawberries that does distributed to the community. We're also adapting that into meat and food processing facilities, which is really exciting'cause that could have a huge impact on food sovereignty and security in the north. And then in addition to that our website, arcticfocus.org is a publishing platform where we tell stories from the Arctic basically by hiring freelancers from the north, and from the south, but as much from the north as we can, to tell stories about climate change, traditional cultural practices, politics, scientists also will publish field journals and things like that on there. And then it also hosts our database, which is the Arctic Research Database. It's the first data agnostic Pan-Canadian Arctic, free repository for primary research data. And it is it can make DOIs[Digital Object Identifiers] and we've had a number of of studies published from the data on that database. And that's also how we've gotten into working on data standards. Specifically enshrining, indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous methodologies in nationally and internationally recognized standards.

Paul Bellows:

The scale of what the Arctic Research Foundation does actually exceeded what I thought we were gonna talk about today. So you, you are scientist, researcher, explorer, farmer, journalist, communicator. It's a lot of different hats. Can you tell me just a little bit about just how many people are employed overall? Like how big is the operation of the ARF.

Tom :

It varies quite a bit seasonally. Because our ships crew, obviously, we staff up quite a bit when we're running all over. We have eight people in Gjoe Haven and then our core management team or a core staff and management team is about 12 people. At any given time we're usually about 20. Plus, we have a number of people on contract, political consultants, especially our captains. So we get up to, we could push 60, maybe 70. At the, at when our fleet is at its absolute largest. Our fleet is it expands and contracts because we have sometimes have transferred ownership of the vessels to communities when appropriate. So our fleet's a little bit smaller right now than it has been in the past, but yeah, it could be kind of day to day, somewhere around 20, 21, 22. And then, throughout the year, it can expand up to, 50, 60, most of the time, up to 70 if we're really pushing something larger. The best way to think of us is we're facilitators and a catalyst. We do in-house research. Like our team at Naurvik are researchers, and we have a chief scientist, but we mostly facilitate other people doing research. We provide the infrastructure for them to be able to do that. We work with the communities to make sure that the to help them find researchers to address the projects that they want. We work with researchers to find communities who are, who want the type of research those researchers are doing to be conducted in their communities. And the reason that we have such a broad mandate really is because of virtuous cycles,. Right, you run the ships, you collect data, you need a database to store that data. You want to tell the story of that online. So that's what we have through our social media channels and our website. So all of it seems, at first glance, like it's a lot of separate things, but they really all compliment each other. And each one enables more success. In the other aspect of it, like we're collecting a lot of data. So it's important that there's good data standards involved in the Arctic. In order for the data to work as efficiently as possible, you need to have good standards for interoperability. And you need to ensure that, again, like everything we do, we're reflecting the communities where we work and doing it on the terms of the people who actually own and steward the land in the north. Which is why we're concentrating on enshrining indigenous methodologies rather than the usual way that things are done, which is industry and research institutions in the south come up with the standards and then everybody in the north has to follow along which is, very backwards when it comes to doing research in the north. So all, all everything plays well, together and is meant to enhance everything else at the foundation.

Paul Bellows:

I love it. So I forgot to put startup on your list of things that you are, data startup. Even for Canadians, I don't think most people appreciate the scale of Canada. We're one of the largest countries on the planet, in terms of like sovereign borders. We're one of the largest countries, but most Canadians are huddled around the warmest, parts of the country, which is, the southern border. That's where a lot of our municipalities are, we're the vast majority of the population. But the scale of Canada as you move towards the North and the Arctic, I think a lot of folks outside Canada would be familiar with our provinces, but we also have our three territories. Which are Yukon, Northwest Territories, and the most recent territory, Nunavut. Nunavut alone accounts for 20% plus of the land, mass of Canada, of the actual territory. Just to bring it into scale for folks, when you travel to your head office from Toronto, can you just talk a little bit about how get there in terms of flights the time duration, because I think that'll help people to understand just the massive scale of Canada.

Tom :

Yeah it's it is a real challenge. Traveling in the Arctic is a real, real challenge. We have people in Gjoe Haven right now that are some of our contract techs from Southern Ontario have gone up to install an HVAC system in Naurvik. And they're stuck. They've been stuck there for a few days because there's a snowstorm coming in. And the last time they were up there, they were stuck there for two weeks. So it's, difficult. But yeah, Canada's about 9 million square kilometers. The Arctic is 40% of that, and that's just the Arctic. That's not including most of the Northwest territories. So that's just in the Arctic Circle, not including all of what people would consider the North of Canada. A few months back I was supposed to travel to Tuktoyaktuk, which is in kind of the northwest part of the Northwest Territories, right on the border of Alaska on the Beaufort Sea. We had a consultation that we were gonna be holding there on a Wednesday. We had two staff flying up from Calgary and then I was gonna fly from Toronto. My flight was leaving on the Monday, early Monday morning. My flight in Toronto was delayed by an hour and a half, which meant that I couldn't connect to my flight in Edmonton, to fly to Yellowknife, where I would then fly from Yellowknife to Inuvik and then drive two and a half hours to Tuktoyaktuk,'cause Tuk only has a runway for emergency medical stuff. It's very small. Which meant I had missed that connection. We looked at every possible way to get to Tuktoyaktuk, flying through Ottawa to Iqaluit, and then over on a milk run, stopping at every little community on the way. Flying through Vancouver. And there was no possible way because of, just because of an hour and a half delay, for me to get to Tuktoyaktuk before Friday, and I was leaving on a Monday, and the consultation was on a Wednesday. Thankfully our guys that were heading up from Calgary were able to make it. But I wasn't actually able to, and to get to Gjoe Haven it's an overnight. Always. So you basically, you usually fly to Edmonton. Sometimes you can fly to Ottawa and then Edmonton, Yellowknife, and then Yellowknife, you get on, you don't have to go through security. If you're flying north past Yellowknife, there's no security you get on a a plane. It's, it actually, oftentimes it's a fairly large plane. Like what's, whatever's the one smaller than a 747? I forget.

Paul Bellows:

It's 737 is usually

Tom :

what they're flying. Yeah, a 737 kind thing. But they do need to be special planes'cause most of the communities have gravel runways and they're very uneven. So it's a fairly regular plane except that you'll be in the back half of the plane and the front half of the plane's just a wall. There's just a wall there. And where normally there'd be more seats then the cockpit, and that's because it's half filled with cargo. You fly to Edmonton, stay overnight, fly to Yellowknife, and then fly to Gjoe Haven. And it's, each of those flights is somewhere around three to four hours. But the last flight to Gjoe Haven, it could take a long time because you'll stop In all the surrounding communities you almost always stop in Cambridge Bay and then some of the other ones around there as well.

Paul Bellows:

And just for folks that are trying to picture this, you're flying from Toronto to Edmonton. This is the flight I do all the time. Depending on whether you're going east or west and you have the jet streams with you or against you. It's about four plus hours, four and a quarter hours to traverse most of the North American content, east to west. Edmonton is about 400 kilometers ish north of Toronto. And then from Edmonton to Yellowknife, you fly another two hours ish. Is that about the length of that flight Edmonton to Yellowknife?

Tom :

A little bit longer, two and a half, maybe three.

Paul Bellows:

I've done it a couple of times, but it's been a little while. But then Yellowknife, again, you're flying another three or four hours of flight north that's how much farther we're going. To think about traversing the entire North American continent, so for somebody in the US that's New York to LA and then you pivot that north, south and you fly that far again, north is, how far north we are going.

Tom :

And Gjoe Haven's not the furthest north community either. Alert is much farther north than that. And Alert has the Tim Hortons. Funnily enough, because it's a military base.

Paul Bellows:

Of course. Canada has to have, its Timmies. So in terms of, just for a little bit, you talked about, you have five ships. You're bringing on another one. You have these operations across what kind of scale are you operating? Like how far are folks who are up there working, traveling to, for data collection?

Tom :

Pretty far. Our busiest ship, which is the one that we're replacing right now is called the William Kennedy. It's come to the end of its life. So we're, it's a 64 foot double wide ship. We like to practice what we call fish boat science. We take used vessels fishing boats, coast guard vessels that are proven arctic hard and have really experienced crew. And then we refit those into research vessels.'cause that's the cheapest way to do it. Because we're a non-profit charity. We charge as little as we possibly can. And, we have to work with very limited federal funding and things like that in order for the ships to go. So the William Kennedy is based out of Dartmouth and it will travel, Northwest along the coast of Labrador up into Hudson Strait, across Hudson Strait, down into Hudson Bay and all through Hudson Bay, up to the kind of north northwest hip where the traditional Marine observatory is. So William Kennedy was the primary research vessel for the Marine Observatory. So I don't know how many kilometers that is, but it's thousands and thousands. And it will also go as far north as Fox Basin which is, just south of the Baffin Island. That's where the Baffinland mine, the southern kind of part of the island where the Baffinland mine is. And yeah, and it does work in Ungava Bay. And yeah, so it's thousands and thousands of kilometers. That's the ship that transits the most. And the ship where we're gonna be replacing it was probably be about twice the length. Not, probably not quite as wide. It's'cause it's a double wide ship. But it's really exciting actually. It's gonna be a steel hauled ship, whereas the Kennedy's fiberglass, so it's ice class. It'll be be able to have a longer season and a longer range, more bunks and really state of the art sensors and things like that to to make it hopefully what'll be the most important research vessel in Canada. And again, I can't stress enough like when I say that we're the only organization with a fleet of near shore capable research vessels in the Arctic. That includes the Canadian Government. There is very little out there. There's a few other. Organizations that have one or two ships. And there's one that actually soon will have, the Qikiqtaaluk Corp will have a third vessel, so they'll have a fleet as well. And they're an Inuit owned organization, and a good partner of ours. But there's a real lack of research infrastructure in the Arctic, and it's a big problem that it's these kind of private organizations that are providing the ships for that. And even then, most of these ships are operating at 50% capacity. There's, because that there's not enough funding to do the kind of work that they need to do.

Paul Bellows:

I suspect just given the global interest in the Arctic in terms of rare minerals, energy, transport, Canada's interest in the Arctic continues to grow. Other nation's interest in the arctics continue to grow. We're talking in 2025, but I think. Other nations are being very interested in Canada's Arctic and what's there? And so just as you operate, you talked about there are, there's some Inuit commercial organizations operating there. There's your organization. Who else are you encountering in the north? Who is operating up there? We have the Inuit people, the, the traditional communities living there. Who, who else are you encountering what is happening in the Arctic, other than people who live there?

Tom :

Obviously the vast majority of the people up there are northern indigenous peoples. And in, in the Arctic specifically, it's mostly Inuit, but not entirely. There's Gwich'in for instance, in the Northwest Territories are also very far north. As well as all the other Indigenous First Nations community and native communities in the Northwest Territories. But there's, aside from that, it's a lot of university researchers, some Parks Canada folks. Other agriculture-Naurvik is actually a partnership between us, the community, and then Agriculture Canada, the National Research Council and the Canadian Space Agency. So folks from there will be up north as well, but it's mostly kind of northern indigenous people. And then other locals there's actually quite a large population. I'm not sure why, but quite a large population from Africa. First generation African immigrants living in Canada's north. I I don't know why that is. I can't even start to speculate, it's something that I've noticed. Then aside from university, government people, then also, like National Geographic is a very close partner of ours. So you have those explorer organizations, things like that, that you see up there as well. Some tourists because there is a cruise ship industry that's growing. And then a lot of mines as well. But where we work, we haven't, worked directly with them, but that's actually changing. Soon we're gonna be doing some work with some of the, some environmental baseline monitoring for infrastructure that's going to be going into kind of work with mines. It's not something I can get too specific on, but it's again, all community led stuff. Environmental monitoring, on behalf of the communities for these big industrial projects.

Paul Bellows:

Amazing. I you talked a little bit, and I love this aspect, that you're really letting the, the indigenous communities who are the experts, who have the tradition and the history and the knowledge you're letting them lead research. But I'd love to just maybe talk a little bit about,'cause research can be a lot of things, what, can you gimme some examples of, maybe like a flagship project in your mind of the kind of data you're capturing. The value that it brings to society. What is, maybe pick a good example to help folks to understand the kind of outcomes you're producing.

Tom :

Sure. Probably the best example is our the work we've been doing in Sherman Basin, which is the inlet to Sherman Basin is actually where the Erebus wreck. Is so you actually have to transit over a part of the exclusion zone for that. You have to get a special permit for it to go into Sherman Basin. It's also that geographically gives you an idea. It's east of Gjoe Haven and it's the, it's part of the traditional lands where the community of Gjoe Haven when they were living a semi-nomadic lifestyle where a lot of the people from that community would've lived originally before they were forced to move by the Canadian government in the mid 20th century to. Through the community of Gjoe Haven, which was more militarily important. Which, was obviously devastating in, in, in so many ways and but I think people are fairly familiar with that. But the area is, it's fascinating. It's in incre. No one has ever actually studied it. No. Obviously indigenous people have lived there for. For centuries, no, like southern scientists have studied it. We're the first people to go in. And we've, for the last several years, National Geographic has supported a project there where we bring youth and elders. We hold what we call a youth elder camp or future leaders camp. Where youth and elders are brought over to the land on Sherman Basin. And the elders can pass their knowledge onto the youth so they can hunt caribou and muskox and cashe them to come pick up later, spearfishing, how to dry meat, and gut fish, and survive on the land in an extremely isolated area. And it's incredible because it's an astoundingly productive area. Like you can't throw a rock and it not hit a seal or a caribou or a muskox. It draws into sharp contrast kind of the lifestyle that was lived by these people before and why they were able to survive that way off the land in an area like that, versus an area like Gjoe Haven where they've been moved to where you need more southern housing, where it isn't as productive in terms of animal life and plant life. And as a result it's much harder to survive off the land and live that traditional lifestyle. And during the summer, the community doesn't really have access to Sherman Basin because you can get there over the ice in the winter, but you need a fairly big ship or a float plane, we use both, to get there during the summer. And so we have a scientist with us. So the idea of these camps is for the elders to, to pass knowledge onto the youth. As well as, for our crew and scientists working with us to learn the community's priorities and learn from them as well, learn the science that they really want to know. There was a scientist on these voyages who was studying animal productivity of the animals in the region, the waters. Installing a bunch of tidal moorings and other sensors, temperature, probably dissolved minerals as well. Taking water samples to find out what's in the water, what kind of microorganisms, whether there's contaminants or things like that. And there are contaminants, there are microplastics even in areas that are that isolated. To contrast with that, I mentioned hydrometry, which is basically using essentially sonar, like really advanced fish finders to map the ocean floor. And we've done that all through Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay for the Kativik and Qikiqtaaluk region regional governments in Nunavik, which is in Northern Quebec. And we are doing, we were doing all that mapping in order to bring fiber optic cables to the community.'cause they're very isolated communities, barely have any access to internet. There were times when we sent people into the field to visit with them to do consultations where we just, they'd be in a community, there was no way to contact them until they got to another community. There was just like, there wasn't phone lines, there wasn't anything. There was no way to connect them, this is going to bring them, good reliable, high speed internet. Underwater cable is really the kind of, the gold standard. Yellowknife, for instance, has an overland cable and it gets cut all the time because of ice shear, extreme weather, forest fires shut it down last summer for several weeks. Underwater, if it's done right and it's armoured properly, usually works a lot better. So yeah, we've been doing work along there with the ships to map the routes for the cables. And while we're doing that, we have marine mammal monitors that we hired. They're locals that we hired that join the step to basically point out, make sure we don't get too close to marine life and make observations about it, which we then log. We hire local fishing boats to show us the best place for landing. So we're using traditional knowledge, some people think traditional knowledge and they think, oh, it's oral history and it might not have that much use in science and that's incorrect. It absolutely does and oral history is a big part of it, but it's also like in terms of the sheer practical our science needs right now, we need to know where our boat can enter the land and get as close as possible to the land safely. Where the areas where the cables can go, where there's not gonna be a bunch of ice moving around, crushing, cutting the cables and it's traditional knowledge that gives us that, you can go, you could spend weeks finding the best spot using sensors, or you could just ask someone who knows. That just gives a really good illustration of traditional knowledge. And then also, we'll invite people out to the ships. We also host youth camps or have hosted youth camps on the ships in the past and are hoping to, again in the future and Great Slave Lake, we'd bring 14 youth onto the ship for two weeks. And they learn from the scientists, they jobs out of the mariners. They'd fish, they'd, watch movies, do all that kind of summer camp stuff, but they'd also, take niskin bottles out and do water sampling and all of that cool stuff as well. So, it's a huge variety. And then in terms of the terrestrial work, like with the labs. In Gjoe Haven we're working on the it's totally off grid. It's not connected to the power supply in the community at all. And Naurvik is, it gets about 70% of its power from wind and solar with a backup diesel generator providing the rest. And the technicians are basically researching ways, the best ways to grow plants, to increase yields, the most efficient way to distribute the power, a line of solar arrays, to calibrate the batteries. We just installed an HVAC system to figure out the best environment in terms of humidity and all that for the plants to thrive. So all of that research is going on as well. And that's the reason CSA, the Canadian Space Agency is involved in that, is because they see that as a test ground for eventually growing food in space or on Mars or the moon, because, it's growing food in an environment where you shouldn't be able to grow it. And yeah, so that gives you an idea, a broad three examples of very different research projects that we're up to.

Paul Bellows:

That's fascinating, the scale of the scope of work. Let's have a technology conversation for a minute and sort of a data practice conversation,'cause you're at heart a data organization, you know that's the mandate

Tom :

Yeah

Paul Bellows:

data and information. But you talked about two different things. I'd love to just have for you to parse this for me. You talked about cultural knowledge and oral tradition where, you know, the transmission of cultural knowledge is itself a practice. How do we manage it? What are we allowed to share, be tracking protocols around cultural knowledge. And that this is true for really anyone in government. We manage private data, health records, the sort of, so there's the operational practice of respecting the privacy and the ownership of that data. But then there's also just the wide variety of your data, like in storing this data and the volumes of data and transmitting this data when you don't always have internet. So just in terms of your data practice what kind of skill sets are you bringing? What kinds of technologies are you using to manage data at this kind of scale?

Tom :

Yeah. Most of the data that we collect is managed by our partners. So, it's either the communities or the research scientists. They have their own data that they're collecting and they're storing in their databases and we are just facilitating the collection of that. But like things like the hydrographic data we did we did hydrography in Great Slave Lake[NWT], all across the lake, the first time it was ever done for cables to run as part of the Taltson Energy project. They haven't been installed yet. But the basic idea is you take hydroelectric electricity from the south of the Northwest Territories, run it across Great Slave Lake into Yellowknife into the other communities there, so they have hydroelectric power. Every community in the north runs on diesel power right now. Which is, very expensive. There's a lot of price fluctuations. The power plants are well past the end of their lives, sometimes 20 years past it, in some cases, I think even more. And it's very polluting. All that hydrographic data, we have permission to upload that onto our database where it's stored as 3D imagery, essentially. As well as there's also numeric data and things like that went along with it. It was all, it was processed by our partners that we collected it with Seaforth Geosurveys. They're a geo survey company out of the technicians who actually run the hydrographic equipment and and store it in the database and tag. We work with an organization called the Canadian Consortium for Arctic Data Interoperability[CCADI]. They're the ones that were running the data standards initiative with, well, actually we're the secretariat for the data standards initiative. There's a working group of northern communities and organizations that, that are essentially the bosses. We did a bunch of consultations, established this working group because we knew that it needs to be northern indigenous people who are saying how this works. But CCADI sorry. They were called CCADI, now they're called the Canadian Polar Data Consortium, CPDC. They knew that and they're all about data interoperability. They knew that you'd never be able to get all of the Arctic, all of the Arctic data or whatever other data. You're never gonna be able to get it all in one database. So they came up with the idea of an ecosystem of databases or a database of databases. So you can search and access and get the key information from one place, and all these databases will work together. We were the first database external to CPDC to be. Integrated into their data ecosystem. So we've adopted all of the kind of standards and matrix where standards might have varied because we used I think ISO 1 1 9 5 or 1 9, 1 5. I can never quite remember the number, but whatever. This, the kind of standard that's generally accepted for for oceanography and arctic data. We used, combined with also some nasa atmospheric tagging and things like that is how we built the database. And then because it was a learning process I'm not a data scientist, right? We built this with a data scientist at University of Manitoba and Red River College. And so we built it that way and then CCADI came in and we either adopted their standards or figured out ways to crosswalk so that our database would work with their ecosystem. And we're actually in the process of publishing a technical paper that we're writing right now on how that is done. Basically a guide to if you're external to this and you want to get into this kind of ecosystem, this is how you do it. So that's how those practices are done. Aside from that it's very ad hoc. Our database is built to be open by default, but it's not hosting traditional indigenous knowledge at the moment. Aside from the fact that kind of anything that's collected in these territories really does belong to the people that live there. So in that way it's, it's traditional knowledge in that way. But we're not hosting that kind of protected traditional knowledge because there is a tension right now, or a problem that needs to be solved; which is that, most data now everyone's moving to open by default. Aside from where things are proprietary, et cetera, but, results and how all of the results in a the raw data needs to be published so people can go through, replicate your study.'cause there's been lots of problems with those with those, with studies not being replicable and all that. Open data is growing. We follow those principles. The one major exception to that is traditional indigenous knowledge. It needs to be protected. It can't just be extracted from these communities and then used to benefit people living in the South or PhD students who are wanting to, write a thesis. It needs to benefit the community. So it needs to be protected and they have the rights to it, to determine how that's done. But in many cases, these communities, they want be able to take their traditional knowledge and use it to get a better understanding of the whole ecosystem in the Arctic and how climate change is happening and how that's being affected. They want what's called the co-generation of knowledge or two-eyed seeing or knowledge braided approach where you're enmeshing a kind of western science or southern science data with traditional knowledge to get a more holistic picture. But there's still a question of how do you actually publish that traditional knowledge data. And, there's some ideas. A new type of creative Commons license where, you need express written permission for every usage of the data. And the knowledge holders are consulted through every step of how that data is used. Might be one option. Something we explored with our database is putting gates up so that only knowledge holders are able to access the data knowledge holders or people they give permission to are able to access the data. But then once the data's accessed, that, that protection erodes. So that's why some kind of licensing, probably some combination of licensing and all that if traditional knowledge wants to get put up there. So there's a lot of questions in terms of how that needs to be done. And the main thing when it comes to those questions is they need to be answered by northerners, right, in collaboration with southerners and data scientists and scientists. But it's the ultimate saying needs to be in the hands of the knowledge holders as to how that needs to be done. So there's a lot of issues there, but that's how we've looked at at several of them.

Paul Bellows:

This space is fraught. It's complex, how to collect knowledge, stories, cultural artifacts, but while respecting the ownership of them because as you say, once data is out on the internet, it's out on the internet. And I know there's a whole project that the University of Washington down in Washington State, they called the technology project they called Mukurtu, which is an Australian aboriginal word for, your carrying purse. You know, the thing you carry your things in when you're out

Tom :

Yeah, I've heard of that.

Paul Bellows:

walking on the land. And it's all about managing the cultural protocols and permission. And I can upload something. I determine who can access and the, if we think that healthcare data is complex, this is at that level of complexity of managing. So there are several technology projects striving to build a platform for managing cultural protocols, it it's challenging. Trust had been eroded historically.

Tom :

And to be clear, it's not, it's also like it doesn't always need to have any involvement from people in the south, either. Like the Arctic Eider Society which is an Arctic indigenous organization, has founded has created an app called Siku, SIKU. And it's they're a partner of ours on the standards initiative. And they, it's basically a map. Where people from local communities can upload whatever data they have. A lot of it is animal observation data and ice condition data. But it's really neat because they figured out a way, and this is actually what we're looking at, is enshrining the first standard that we've that the working group on the Arctic Data Initiative is working on. They've found a way that if someone is, uploading data from Gjoe Haven in Kitikmeot. You know, Obviously the term for fat polar bear or sick Arctic Char or healthy Arctic Char, that's going to be in Inuktuk. Then if someone from Gwich'in wants to access that data, they can write, they can type it in Gwich'in and get the results back in Gwich'in. So they've figured out a way to crosswalk between the different languages and methodologies for their, traditional ways of observing this animal data and then plotted it on a map so you can click and get all the information in a specific geographic area and get it in your local language or local dialect.'Cause there's several many different dialects of Inuktitut, to just name one, and that is that crosswalk between them, which is a technical ability that they've developed is what we're looking at as enshrining, as a standard in terms of Arctic animal observations. And so that's one of the possibilities. We haven't decided we're going to do that, but that it's been suggested that be one of the things we look at.

Paul Bellows:

Fascinating projects around data standards. Who is the customer of some of this data? What are some of the stories of who's been able to use this data and what they've been able to accomplish? Like we're collecting all this data, we're managing all this data, we've got all these, fleets out and people, and, connections to community. What, do you have a story or an example of use of this data that, that, that's been, that something that wouldn't have happened outside of your efforts?

Tom :

Yeah, I mean, it varies widely for the, obviously the research. The University researchers that we're working with they're publishing papers based off of it, which can then be used. The raw data that they're collecting is published and can then be used to better understand how climate change or, like for instance a study into Beluga Health how to address those health outcomes, how to obtain contaminants research, how to look into contaminants flowing into Great Slave Lake from the oil sands, and what effect that's having, how to mitigate that. Why cancer rates are so high in the community of Délı̨nę[Deline] in the Northwest Territories, where the uranium mines are located and they don't know if it's H. pylori, they don't know if it's uranium or what, but there's research being done into that, to, to determine that. So those are some very specific ones. At the end of the day, it's, for us, it's all about the communities, we don't care what data we're collecting so long as it's useful to the communities. And obviously we have their permission and it's done in collaboration with them. But there's a huge number of different stakeholders. So community first. And that again, could be anything from this is where the animals are. This is why their migration patterns are changing, this water is contaminated or it's not, or it's safe to drink. These are where the contaminants are coming from. This is how to mitigate it. Those are some of the practical applications. Narvik, obviously, is about how to grow food in the north and how to come up, but more than that, it's also about a social and economic model. How do we replicate this in other communities and make it sustainable because we're paying the salaries right now. How do we generate, how do the communities figure out an economic model to generate enough funds to make it sustainable in the long term so that it can be replicated in other communities and they can have fresh produce grown locally as opposed to shipped up from the south and that it's, by the time it hits the shelves, it's rotting and it costs$14 for a bag of lettuce. And also, we're in terms of the camps sometimes some of that will be filmed and then published to the world at large to tell these stories, which is also what we're doing through our website. So it really there's a huge variety but I think at the end of the day, it's about serving the communities, finding the information that they really want, and also getting creating a greater understanding of how the ecosystem is changing in the Arctic and what we need to do to, to remediate or stop that or, what needs to happen on a grander scale to basically inform both the scientific community and policy makers and just your average person.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah, we live in a world that is changing in, in, in climate ways. It's changing in political ways. It's changing in economic ways, and what we need to do is understand. And we need to understand what's happening. And so I, I am grateful for the work you do Tom, and I'm grateful you took an hour out of your schedule'cause you have a lot on the go clearly to share some of this with our with our audience. I think it's been fascinating and I just can't wait to stay tuned to what you're gonna accomplish next. And good luck with the procurement of your next research vehicle.

Tom :

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And just if I could add just one more thing on the sovereignty piece because that is such an important issue now too. We really desperately, Canada needs to, we're doing a lot of work, but we're doing that kind of in spite of a lack of government funding in a lot of ways. Going to ISED[Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada] and ECCC[Environment and Climate Change Canada] and whomever else, and just patching together funding. And that's something that we and everybody has to do to, whether it's doing a research project or building a meat processing plant. It's extremely difficult and the funding is not designed for communities in the north to access it. We just had an application that a community that we work with was rejected because they weren't able to log into the GC[Government of Canada] Key website because the internet is so bad in the community, they couldn't get past the two factor authentication, and the agency would not allow us to upload it on their behalf. So they were caught in a fund designed for these communities, they're not able to access because of just poor planning. And lack consultation and collaboration on the government's part, but we are really falling behind. China has already tried to invest in several mines in the north and it looks like they have managed through a subsidiary to invest in one, in Nunavut. Huawei is offering to build internet infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure. For a lot of these communities, and you have to remember, these are settled land claims. These people own this land. They're essentially sovereign nations. If Canada doesn't do it, then they have no reason to not turn to another country. If we don't do it, someone else will. That's a key thing to know. Russia has just invested, I think two years ago, announced a$300 billion investment into the Russian Arctic. And just to give you an idea of the scale of the infrastructure in the Arctic on the 69th Parallel, that's where Gjoe Haven is located, it's a community of 1300 people. A city called, Norilsk, in Russia. It's also on the 69th Parallel and it has 220,000 people and it is not the largest city in the Russian Arctic. There's two other Murmansk and and Yakutsk are also in the Arctic. Russia has major population centers in the Arctic, largely based around mining for rare earth minerals. And Canada has lagged so far behind. Russia has, nuclear powered icebreakers that can pull up to pull up to a community and provide all the power for a mid-sized city. They have very small nuclear generators that they can use as well, that they can deploy as needed. They have giant land crawlers that look like something from Star Wars on Luke Skywalker's own planet of Tatooine, the sand crawler that goes along. They have things that look like that just built for the Arctic. And we're so far behind in Arctic infrastructure. There is a huge dispute about the Northwest passage, which is Canadian sovereign territory. But the United States our, our closest ally, maybe not at the moment, but historically our closest ally disputes that claim and only 10% of Arctic waters are mapped properly in Canada. I've heard estimates that China and Russia have 60% of our waters mapped. Russian submarines have been pushing in to our territory as well, and we don't have the sensors to know where they are. We also don't have the sensors in the north to know if Russia launches hypersonic missiles. There's a huge lack of infrastructure. There's a lot of external pressures for investment and infrastructure that these communities could turn to if they want to. And there's very little reason for them not to. God knows Canada has not treated them well in the past. We need to get our act together and we need to radically change the way that we're delivering programs and infrastructure in the Arctic and this piecemeal approach and have a whole of government mandate for a cross departmental mandate, whole of government approach to delivering programs and infrastructure in the Arctic. That's what the United States and other Arctic nations have. Whereas our departments are all doing it in little piecemeal bits and pieces which is just not effective and it won't be effective if we don't change how we do things. We're gonna continue to lag behind and we're gonna start seeing impacts on our sovereignty as well.

Paul Bellows:

This is a powerful call to action. Your work is essential to this, but it's clear that Canada in 2025 is at an inflection point here, and we need to take the north If we claim to be a northern country. And if we claim to have the Arctic in these regions as part of our borders, if you don't want the maps to be redrawn, we need to be president in the north and we can't be president if we don't have the data. If you don't understand the terrain, if you don't understand the communities, if you don't have relationships there. So thank you for laying the groundwork for what Canada can become if we if we start to take this seriously.

Tom :

My pleasure, thanks, thanks so much for having me.

Paul Bellows:

Wonderful. Tom, thank you so much.

Tom :

Alright, take care man.

Paul Bellows:

Thanks so much for joining us for this conversation. Tom is a passionate leader and an advocate for data and research. I'm grateful for the work that the Arctic Research Foundation does, and now I'm even more committed to finding my way to this part of the world to see the Arctic for myself. I've been to Whitehorse and Yellowknife and other cities in Canada's north, but would love the opportunity to explore the vast regions of Canada beyond these cities. Some of the themes in Tom's work that are worth highlighting include: The Arctic Research Foundation is committed to community led science and infrastructure projects. The foundation has a special focus on the cultural knowledge of Indigenous groups to ensure Canada can benefit from their history in the region while respecting their cultural protocols. Some of Tom's challenges include the vast scale of the Arctic, always inadequate government funding, geopolitical tensions, and the need to respect the cultural knowledge of Indigenous communities that live there. Canada wants to maintain its presence and sovereignty in the Arctic, and to do so, research and data projects are critical. Without the Arctic Research Foundation, none of this would be possible. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please do subscribe and follow us for more. I'd like to thank my colleagues who work with me on this podcast. Kathy Watton is our show producer and editor. Frederick Brummer and Ahmed Khalil created our theme music and intro. We're going to keep having conversations like this. Thanks for tuning in! If you've got ideas for guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@Northern.Co. The public serNaurvike is about all of us. And when it's done right, digital can be a key ingredient for a better world. This has been The 311 Podcast and I'm your host, Paul Bellows.