The grazing land in northern Fennoscandia is increasingly disturbed by cumulative land-use pressures. These include intensive forestry, outdoor tourism, and road and railway traffic. Additionally, mining and wind farms are developing in the north. A newly published study has mapped and estimated the overall extent of these cumulative pressures, together with other stressors, namely predator presence and climate change.
Previous studies have mostly focused at regional scales. In this research, the authors have used an integrated large-scale GIS analysis over three countries: Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Their results suggest that about 60 percent of the region is subjected to multiple pressures, and that 85 percent is exposed to at least one pressure. This dramatically reduces the size and quality of the summer grazing area. According to the findings, only 4 percent of the area still remains undisturbed.
The fact that many pressures are at play in this region is not new. The reindeer herders, the policymakers, but also the scientific community studying reindeer ecology are well aware of these problems.“What is new is the fact that we finally managed to get an overview of these pressures over the whole area. This was not easy, as the different land-uses act at different scales and can be very dynamic, so can be the predators, and the effects of climate change on grazing,” Marianne Stoessel says.
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