Researchers from the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) have chosen Bethel for a project looking at the economic impacts of changes in land, sea, and air transportation over time.
Matt Hegland is a researcher with UAA’s College of Engineering. He visited Bethel this week to complete in-person surveys and get the word out about the project. He said that it’s the first of its kind for Alaska.
"We looked at 2003 to 2023 … at the unemployment rate and the income, and we gathered data on flights, and barges, and even the ice road to kind of look at how it impacts the economy," Hegland said.
Hegland said that hard numbers were available for barge traffic and flights in and out of Bethel from Anchorage, but the impacts of the Kuskokwim River Ice Road were trickier to analyze. That’s because there is just not a lot of data. The team used climate data to guess when river conditions would have made an ice road possible.
"And so we gathered data on snow depth and temperature and how that changed over time," Hegland said.
Hegland and the project’s lead researcher, Dr. Osama Abaza, are using a machine learning model that gives a detailed look at the correlations between numbers over time. The more it is fed, the more accurately the model can predict what comes next.
Hegland said that results show that air traffic between Bethel and Anchorage – including the percentages of flights that are on-time, delayed, and canceled – had the greatest impact on income over the two-decade span. But he also said that the results are only preliminary. This week, Hegland has been gathering survey responses around Bethel that make up the final stage of the research.
"We're just looking to get a better picture of the human impact of changes in transportation accessibility, and how some of the changes in climate could be impacting people," Hegland said.
For Bethel residents interested in sharing about changes they have seen in transportation accessibility, scan the QR code below. For more information, call Matt Hegland at 320-492-0059 or email him at mhegland@alaska.edu.
