Scientists Spent 4 Years Tracking Reindeers in Finland — What They Found Changes Everything
Finland, sitting on the lip of the Arctic, is a country of extremes. Every Christmas season, it’s at the extreme of magic, looking like a winter wonderland. However, the Christmas of 2024 left the people in Finland a bit disappointed. As per the AFP News Agency, there wasn’t even a snowflake in sight, and several reindeer seemed to have vanished from the snowy forests and wilderness. This year, on Christmas, the scenario is not likely to change, according to a report published in Science of the Total Environment.
As climate change forces snow cover to loosen itself from the ground, the unfreezing snow is slowly shifting the magical extreme of Finland into an extreme of tragedy. The report by AFP News Agency revealed an unpredictable pattern of excess rains, dwindling snow, and exacerbating heat simmering in Finland. Another recent report published in Science Advances estimated that the global reindeer population could decline by more than 50% by 2100, with the steepest decline in the Arctic, by 74%. With the heating up of the Arctic, some herders and conservationists are worried about the impacts on reindeer populations residing there.
In Finland, reindeer are mostly found in the snow-covered understories of northern forests where bountiful hoards of carbon are locked up in the soil. While these ungulate grazers roam the forests, they dig up lichens, mushrooms, tiny plants, orange birch boletes, and porcinis to eat, and they unknowingly support this carbon release cycle. Researchers from the University of Oulu were interested in understanding how reindeer grazing and snow cover affect the carbon cycle. So, they ventured into the Finnish forestlands, geared up with plastic skirts, chains, soil collars, and battery-driven fans and sensors for carbon dioxide.
Between 2019 and 2023, they conducted several experiments, tracking both the grazing reindeer and the patches of land, both grazed and ungrazed. The ungrazed regions included Oulanka in eastern Finland, where grazing had been excluded for the past 25 years, and Kevo in northern Finland, where grazing hadn’t happened for the past 55 years. The researchers carried out surveys in both the shallower and sunlit habitats of these forests, which were dotted with groves of lingonberry, crowberry, bilberry, and carpets of feather moss.
By segmenting both the shallow and deep patches into “subplots,” researchers created a “portable manual chamber system” to detect carbon dioxide measurements, according to the paper. Recordings revealed that the snow cover and depth indeed had an enormous effect on the health of the soil. Deeper snow, for instance, enabled a greater microbial activity, such as nitrogen (N) mineralization. Also, in the patches left ungrazed for decades, the population of lichens appeared to be thriving, as a result of which, the soil maintained constant fertility, warm temperature, and ample moisture.
As the thick blanket of snow insulated the soil and increased the soil’s temperature, it affected the availability and content of N. While shallower snow increases the carbon release from the understory, deeper snow decreases it. In some areas, however, such as the 25-year-old Oulanka site, the carbon release remained stable for several years. “Altogether, this could indicate that northern coniferous forests may be relatively well resistant to short-term changes in winter climate,” Noora Kantola, the study’s lead author, explained to BBC Discover Wildlife.
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