Nicole Herman-Mercer

Nicole is a co-principal investigator on the Arctic Rivers Project and a lead Social Scientist in the Water Mission Area of the USGS. Her research focuses on Indigenous Alaskan social systems and the implications of climate and environmental changes on these systems. She is a strong advocate for knowledge of co-production. 

She was drawn to this project because of the spatial scale of it and long timescale. “I really value the commitment to co-production and the opportunity to conduct science differently. It doesn’t often happen that these things are considered at the very beginning of a project and I’m excited that we have the chance to develop best practices for this kind of work.” Nicole also looks forward to collecting narratives from Indigenous communities that can be combined with the projects’ climate models to get a more holistic view of the effects of a changing environment on these communities.