Abstract
A new glacier inventory was developed for the Ragged Range, an area only recently added to Nahanni National Park Reserve, Northwest Territories. Federal mapping from aerial photography in 1982 was compared with Landsat satellite imagery from 2008. Glacier cover decreased in area by 30 % over that period; the greatest percentage loss was in glaciers with areas between 1 and 10 km2, while the largest number of disappearances was of glaciers 0.1–1 km2 in area. The smallest glaciers less than 0.1 km2 in area showed little loss to modest growth in topographic niches protected from solar radiation. Recommendations for further work in this environmentally significant frontier region are provided.
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Acknowledgments
Danielle Finckling, Veronique Pinard, and Mark Ednie for GIS support in the GSC’s Glaciology Remote Sensing/Modeling Lab; from the NNPR Fort Simpson base, Steve Catto, Doug Tate, Lisa Moore, Scott Cameron, Kim Schlosser, and Chuck Blyth for support, all manner of good advice, and conservation perspectives; Herb Norwegian, Dehcho First Nations for a conversation on ecological values; the Aurora Research Institute, for connecting us with the communities and their elders; Dan McCarthy, Brock University for perspectives on where we might go with this; Matt Beedle, Steve Bertollo, Margie Demuth, Susan Henry, and Troy Searson for field support; Colin Munro, Great Slave Helicopters for friendly and competent aviation support; Atkinson Fellowship recipient and author Ed Struzik for telling our stories.
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Demuth, M.N., Wilson, P., Haggarty, D. (2014). Glaciers of the Ragged Range, Nahanni National Park Reserve, Northwest Territories, Canada. In: Kargel, J., Leonard, G., Bishop, M., Kääb, A., Raup, B. (eds) Global Land Ice Measurements from Space. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79818-7_16
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