7. CONCLUSIONS The findings of the Oil and Gas Subgroup study “Environmental Risk Assessments of Oil and Gas Activities Using National Security and Civilian Data Sources” are: 1. Remotely sensed imagery with between 1- and 2-meter spatial resolution (such as that soon to be available from commercial satellite vendors) is an essential ingredient for a reliable GIS-based environmental risk assessment. This type of imagery can lessen the need for expensive and time-consuming field-collected data and can enable risk assessments to be accomplished more quickly, cheaply, and reliably given the ability to extrapolate high spatial detail into broad-area-coverage SPOT and Landsat scenes. 2. Historical imagery data available only from national security sources are essential to developing accurate information on baseline ecological conditions and change over time. The U.S. and Russian approaches to ecological risk assessment constitute complementary methods of optimized environmental management. Both methods provide a comprehensive picture of threat probability for physical and biological aspects of the environment, and both provide an opportunity to jointly evaluate quantitative, temporal, spatial, and economic features of ecological risk. 3. GIS technology—as demonstrated by the U.S.-Russian Priobskoye GIS database—is an excellent tool for managing and displaying data to be used in risk assessments of oil and gas exploration and production activities in fragile arctic and subarctic ecosystems. 4. Example assessments of the risk to fish, waterfowl, and forests from stressors such as oil spills, soil sprays, and road construction showed the interplay of the dynamic Ob flood plain cycle (freeze, thaw, flood, dry) with the receptor critical intervals (spawning, migration, nesting, and new growth). 5. Cooperation between U.S. and Russian government agencies and oil companies will lessen the environmental impact of oil and gas development. Government regulatory agencies and oil and gas companies will be able to use risk assessment methodology to identify and manage risk in an effective fashion.
