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MILJØFORSK-Miljøforskning for en grønn samfunnsomstilling

Productivity effects in reindeer from changes in human land use

Alternative title: Effekter av arealbruksendringer på produktivitet hos rein

Awarded: NOK 8.2 mill.

Habitat fragmentation and loss of biodiversity due to human land-area pressure is internationally recognized as a main threat to the earth's ecosystems and their ability to supply ecosystem services. The negative effects of habitat loss and fragmentation are also reinforced by climate change, which reduces the quality and access to critical habitats. There is therefore a great need for methods that enable us to monitor how the ecosystems are affected by these changes, and how they affect the ecosystem services on which we depend. We have studied how habitat use and productivity of wild and domestic reindeer are affected by the cumulative effects of habitat fragmentation and disturbance from human activities. A central part of the project has been to develop methods to understand what affects habitat suitability for reindeer. Information about which areas the reindeer prefer to use has come from positional data from GPS marked reindeer. We have modeled these data as a function of available map data that measures the environmental conditions in areas with reindeer throughout Norway, and which may be expected to influence the habitat suitability of reindeer pastures, including the distribution of various types of infrastructure and predators. A central premise in this approach is that the habitat suitability, and in particular the distribution of food, determines the distribution of reindeer in the landscape and that negative effects of human activity and predators can be detected as avoidance behaviour. We have developed a methodology that makes it possible to statistically calculate the cumulative effect of many sources of influence that have overlapping effects on the reindeer's land use. The method makes it possible to both calculate the strength of the avoidance response of reindeer to various types of infrastructure and the size of the zone around the infrastructure where the reindeer's behavior is affected. The analyses support previous work in that there are large effects of human activity and infrastructure on reindeer land use. For domestic reindeer, model predictions of habitat suitability were evaluated against the traditional knowledge of reindeer herders with lifelong experience in herding reindeer in their respective reindeer districts. Particularly related to the winter habitats, there were discrepancies between model results and traditional knowledge. The analyses provided updated estimates of the effect on the reindeer's land use of different forms of infrastructure, both regarding the degree to which the reindeer avoid the type of infrastructure and the size of the zone around the infrastructure that was affected. Unfortunately, available data on predator occurrences were not suitable for such analyses. In general, we found the expected relationship between the degree of human activity linked to infrastructure types and the effect the infrastructure had on avoidance behavior in reindeer. Reindeer avoided public cabins with heavy traffic to a greater extent than individual private cabins, but to an even greater extent they avoided areas around larger aggregations of private cabins. Likewise, reindeer avoided roads and paths with heavy traffic to a greater extent than smaller roads and paths with less traffic. The analyzes indicated that there are differences in the response to human disturbances and infrastructure between domestic and wild reindeer, and these differences varied between key periods in the reindeer's annual cycle – the winter, the calving period and the summer. The results indicated, however, also that the available data were not sufficiently comprehensive to provide a good description of how the variation in environmental conditions and herding practices, found within reindeer husbandry in Norway, affects the reindeer's land use. This resulted in uncertainty with respect to the degree results could be generalized to other herds than the study areas from which GPS data were available. An ongoing Norwegian-Swedish collaboration attempt to evaluate this further. Nevertheless, preliminary results indicate that the reindeer grazing areas that were calculated to have the large proportion of good habitat produce relatively more calves than those that were estimated to contain less suitable habitat. Correspondingly, we found that areas that were burdened with a lot of human infrastructure reported relatively fewer calves than those that had less human infrastructure within their pastures.

Kunnskapen som har kommet fram gjennom prosjektet er brukt for kartdata (https://view.nina.no/QN/#section-klassifisering) som har fungert som støtte i forbindelse med gjennomføring av klassifiseringen av villreinbestandene i henhold til Kvalitetsnorm for villrein, og da spesifikt i forbindelse med delnorm 3, leveområder og menneskelig påvirkning. De viktigste resultatene er også gjort tilgjengelig i interaktive kart som er lett tilgjengelig for forvaltningen og andre interesserte gjennom nettsiden til Renewable reindeer (https://www.nina.no/english/Fields-of-research/Projects/RenewableReindeer_new). Med bakgrunn i kunnskapen som er generert gjennom ProdChange og tilgrensende prosjekter har vi bidratt med scenarioanalyser som beregner hvor store beitearealer som vil gjenvinnes gjennom ulike tiltak for a forbedre situasjonen for villrein i Rondane (se https://brage.nina.no/nina-xmlui/handle/11250/3104863)

Habitat fragmentation and loss of biodiversity due to human land-area pressure is internationally recognized as a main threat to the earth's ecosystems and their ability to supply ecosystem services. Faced with such major changes, there is an urgent need of methods for mapping and monitoring of how ecosystems services are impacted by these changes. Moreover, these new methods must be implemented in research protocols that facilitate upscaling of ecological processes so that they can be readily used by management authorities to promote sustainable land use in the future. We focus on how habitat use and productivity of wild and semi-domesticated reindeer in Norway are affected by cumulative effects including, habitat fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, and increased large carnivore populations. Our methodological framework ensures that results of ecological process studied in detail in a selected set of reindeer populations can be readily used to predict consequences of altered land use on a nation-wide scale. The work will contribute with overall risk assessments and outline efficient mitigation strategies for a socio-ecological system that is highly valued nationally. The methods developed during this project will be highly relevant in terms of linking land-area pressure and land management with the habitat use and productivity of herbivore populations throughout the Arctic biome.

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MILJØFORSK-Miljøforskning for en grønn samfunnsomstilling