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Climate warming is projected to be especially pronounced at high latitudes. Rising temperatures and associated impacts at local to Pan-Arctic scales are likely to be significant. National and international networks that target spatially and temporally intensive monitoring of land, atmosphere, and ocean processes are critically important investments for understanding our changing climate and environmental responses to those changes. Despite the potential implications of climatic change to environmental, societal, and political systems, the Arctic has a limited record of observations, both in terms of record length and spatial coverage. Resource and logistical constraints limit the frequency, extent, and optimality of spatial sampling of environmental observations. In the Arctic, reduced access limits most station locations to low elevations near the coast or near to roads and population centers, necessitating the development of a systematic sampling strategy to maximize coverage and objectively represent environmental variability at scales that are important to the land manager, decision-maker, or other stakeholder. Described here is a quantitative methodology for designing observing networks, stratifying sampling domains, informing site selection, and determining the representativeness of measurement sites and networks. This analysis provides model-inspired insights into optimal sampling strategies, offers a framework for up-scaling measurements, and provides a down-scaling approach for integration of models and measurements. These techniques can be applied at different spatial and temporal scales to meet the needs of individual …