ANCHORAGE — A new management plan for the vast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska splits the Indiana-size area roughly in half between conservation areas and land available for petroleum development, and allows pipelines carrying oil or gas to be constructed through the federal reserve.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Thursday he had signed a record of decision for the reserve west of Prudhoe Bay and south of Barrow on Alaska’s North Slope. He said the balanced approach under the plan was the result of extensive local testimony.

ANCHORAGE — A federal agency has concluded that a petition seeking to list Alaska’s cold-water corals as endangered or threatened does not contain enough information to make the case.

The National Marine Fisheries Service announced Tuesday it had rejected the petition submitted in August by the Center for Biological Diversity, which sought a formal endangered species review for 44 cold-water corals because of threats from fishing trawlers, ocean warming, ocean acidification, shipping and oil spills.

ANCHORAGE — Alaska’s Cleveland Volcano is heating up and scientists are on alert in case it sends up an ash cloud that could threaten trans-Pacific flights.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory detected elevated surface temperatures Jan. 24 at Cleveland’s summit. Satellite data obtained last week indicated that a growing lava dome on the floor of the summit crater had reached about 328 feet, or 100 meters, in diameter.

The summit crater itself is nearly 10 times that size, said Chris Waythomas of the U.S. Geological Survey.

ANCHORAGE — The federal government said Tuesday it rejected a plan to build a road through a wildlife refuge that would have given a small Aleut village in Alaska better access to medical care.

Villagers in remote King Cove had sought the one-lane gravel road for transporting emergency medical patients to an all-weather airport in Cold Bay, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it will choose the “no action” alternative to a proposed land swap for a road corridor bisecting Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.