Northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland have a long history of reindeer herding. It has changed the Fennoscandian alpine scenery and is also viewed as a way to reduce the impacts of climate change on flora.
Nonetheless, new research found that the bulk of this grazing area is vulnerable to cumulative stresses presented by the northward extension of human activity.
The majority of reindeer grazing land is under cumulative pressures
(Photo : YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
Cumulative land-use constraints are progressively disrupting grazing land in northern Fennoscandia.
Northern development includes intensive forestry, outdoor tourism, road and rail traffic, but also mining, and wind farms, as per ScienceDaily.
The recently published study mapped and evaluated the total breadth of these cumulative stresses, as well as the existence of predators and climate change.
Previous research has primarily concentrated on regional dimensions; however, the authors employed an integrated large-scale GIS study across three countries: Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Their findings indicated that around 60% of the region is susceptible to numerous pressures and that the remaining 85% is subject to at least one pressure.
This significantly reduces both the size and quality of the summer grazing area.
What is new is that researchers have now obtained a comprehensive picture of these stresses throughout the whole region.
This was difficult since various land-uses function at different scales and may be quite dynamic, as can predators and the impacts of climate change on grazing, according to Marianne Stoessel.
Even in the altitudes, grazing is an important mechanism for preserving plant diversification.
"So we needed to explore the magnitude of these cumulative stresses while keeping summer pastures in mind, where grazing occurs," explained Professor Regina Lindborg, co-author of the paper and project coordinator at Stockholm University.
This study predicted significant risk of vegetation and landscape change in the future due to the great extent of cumulative pressures over the region and climate change, resulting in a concentration of grazing in less disturbed regions and invasion of trees and shrubs in disturbed areas.
Grazing and biodiversity
There is little doubt that previous, primarily uncontrolled grazing caused significant harm to rangelands, as per New Mexico State University.
However, extrapolating these mostly historical implications to modern activities is dubious.
On the contrary, extensive research has demonstrated that good livestock grazing may and, in certain situations, is required to preserve and improve biodiversity and other rangeland functions.
Ranching is the most sustainable future land-use choice on rangelands for preserving the functionality of the large-scale biological processes that generated rangelands.
These are also the very processes that create biodiversity on rangelands.
When numerous rare species inhabit the same biological locations yet require fundamentally different structures or ecological states, focusing on highlighted species rather than ecological processes might lead to avoidable confrontations.
Furthermore, attempting to help a particular species by keeping a location in its current biological state in perpetuity is a hopeless war against nature.
Rather, management should try to preserve the biological processes that generate varied ecological states across pastures and landscapes, while also accepting variability in disturbance and other processes that transform current states into different ecological states.
Related article: Vast Aspen Grove Pando Slowly Dies from Grazing Wildlife
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