The Arctic Environmental Problems - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 513

of biogeochemical, biogeocenotic and hydrologic processes that occur in the boreal
systems. Creation of such a model will ease the development of the database
requirements and will make it possible to obtain means for estimating the conse-
quences of anthropogenic projects. Using this model, the consequences can be
estimated for forest cutting and

fires, for the broadening of zones with disturbed
land cover, for land and basin pollution with oil, hydrogeological changes on the
separate territories due to submerging of landscapes, territorial pollution with waste
materials from the mining industry, etc.
(7) Stability estimation of the Arctic systems under variable global climate
conditions. Human activities in the delicate ecosystems of the Far North need to be
conducted with great care. But how is the natural balance to be safe from the rising
in fl uence of human civilization with its industrial machines? — how can the survival

of these ecosystems be evaluated in different situations? these and other questions

need to be answered as the program outlined above is realized.
An understanding of the environmental processes in the Arctic regions, a pre-
requisite for

—

c solutions to the problems arising there, can be found
only by combining many disciplines, including ecology, oceanography, mathe-
matical modeling, and system analysis. This chapter synthesizes many data sources
and knowledge from various scienti

finding scienti

fields in the form of a Spatial Simulation
Model of the Arctic Ecosystem (SSMAE). Separate blocks of the SSMAE were
created earlier by many authors (Riedlinger and Preller 1991; Muller and Peter
1992; Legendre and Krapivin 1992; Krapivin 1995). The sequence of these blocks
in the SSMAE structure and the adaptation of it to the Spatial Global Model (SGM)
provide a technology for computer experiments (Krapivin 1993).
The goal of the NSF ARCSS Program is to answer the question: What do
changes in the arctic system imply for the future? To address this question,
researchers must:

c

Advance from a component understanding to a system understanding of the
Arctic.

￿

Understand the behavior of the arctic system — past, present and future.

￿

Understand the role of the Arctic as a component of the global system.

￿

Include society as an integral part of the arctic system.

￿

AMAP is an international organization established in 1991 to implement com-
ponents of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). Now a program
group of the Arctic Council, AMAP

' is current objective is “ providing reliable and

suf cient information on the status and threats of the Arctic environment, and

providing scienti c advice on actions to be taken in order to support Arctic gov-

ernments in their efforts to take remedial and preventive actions relating to con-
taminants

”

( http://www.amap.no ; AMAP 2009).
The present chapter describes a simulation system based on sets of computer
algorithms for processing data from monitoring of the Arctic regions and for
applying mathematical models of natural and anthropogenic processes.
The basic blocks of the SSMAE are oriented on the description of the dynamics
of any given pollutant. For consideration of a speci

c pollutant it is necessary to