Three Pond Inlet men train for on the land monitoring program

The Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) has launched a community monitoring program in response to concerns about seismic testing and increased shipping traffic in Baffin Bay.

The pilot year of the program will recruit four people in Pond Inlet to keep track of animals and where locals hunt them.

The information collected by the monitors will be used by the association for environmental advocacy. 

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"It's not just raw data gathering, it's working towards something. It's contributing to different things that are affecting the North," said QIA's Steven Lonsdale, the project lead. 

He said the association relied on traditional knowledge collected in past studies to help make the case for the Lancaster Sound proposed marine conservation area.

And he anticipates similar circumstances where data could be useful in the High Arctic, which is why Pond Inlet was chosen for the project.

But in the meantime, the information will be available for use by the community, which Lonsdale said it the crux of community-monitoring.

"The whole idea behind it is to have the monitors do what they naturally do. They're heading out to the areas that they normally go to — where they normally hunt and so we're just asking them to record and observe the different things they're doing." 

In that process they will record environmental conditions, note the GPS coordinates of where they caught an animal and observe the health of the animal, paying attention to anything unusual.

Their notes will feed into an in-house QIA computer program to generate monthly maps and longer term trend analysis on environmental conditions.  

Training the monitors

The program has been in development for more than a year with funding partners Oceans North and Nunavut General Monitoring Plan, but training finally got underway in early May.

Lonsdale spent a weekend with three of the monitors—one day was technical training, explaining the reason for the program and the GPS equipment, and one day on the land to put into practice what they'd learned.

Brian Kaasarnak, Don Innualuk, and Johnny Takawgak have all signed on to be monitors until the season ends when the ice breaks up.

"They're all relatively young, they're all in their 20s, so it's quite different to be gathering traditional knowledge from such a young group, but these guys are very knowledgeable, they've been hunting their whole lives." 

Lonsdale said he's hoping a fourth monitor will be trained soon and he has a list of names suggested by the Pond Inlet hunters and trappers association to pick from.

Monitors will be recruited seasonally and will receive a weekly honorarium and some money for gas and repairs.

New monitors will be trained for the boating season, when snowmobile season ends, and if all goes well Lonsdale hopes the program will grow to be in all communities.