Mapping Nutritional Landscapes of Reindeer

According to a traditional Lappish myth, the world was created from a reindeer – its veins became rivers, its fur became forests, its stomach became oceans, and its horns became mountains. 

Reindeer are important to Finland – to its culture, tourism, and industry. But the impacts of climate change are affecting these iconic animals and threatening the livelihoods of herders as natural foods become scarce. This was the starting point of my 2021 Fulbright Specialist Program project at the University of Lapland with Professor Bruce Forbes. But I learned during my Fulbright assignment in Lapland that there is more to the story. Increased human activity is also having an impact, changing habitats and constraining foraging movements. Understanding these impacts requires partnerships with academics from a range of fields and with the herders impacted.

With the help of a Friends of Fulbright Finland Alumni Enrichment Award, I headed back to Lapland in the summer of 2024 to expand the collaboration to include Professor Florian Stammler of the University of Lapland, and Iida Melamies and Viola Ukkola, reindeer herders from the Sattasniemi reindeer herding cooperative, who also are students at the University of Lapland.

My postdoc, Gerardo Celis and nutritional ecologists Matt Sponheimer from the University of
Colorado and Oliver Paine from San Diego State University, and anthropologist John Ziker of Boise State rounded out the team with help from a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. We met in Sodankylä.

During our stay, Iida and Viola took us all around the Sattasniemi paliskunta: preferred feeding areas, those the reindeer avoid, active forestry zones, a wind farm, a gold mine, and a site slated for mining development.

We collected hundreds of plant samples for nutrient analysis so we can begin to map nutrient
landscapes to understand impacts of human development in addition to climate change. We also left instructions for the herding community to collect more samples throughout the year so that, with our new partners from the Sattasniemi cooperative, we can monitor changes over space and time. 

The Friends of Fulbright Finland Alumni Enrichment Award helped me to establish a collaboration to map nutritional properties of reindeer plant foods onto Finnish herding districts over space and time. This work is becoming increasingly important as climate change and human development continue to impact natural reindeer foods and movement patterns and affect the herders that rely on these majestic and important animals for their livelihoods.

Peter Ungar
Distinguished Professor and Program Director
University of Arkansas 

2021 Fulbright Specialist Program
2023–24 Friends of Fulbright Finland Alumni Enrichment Award

Read the whole Fulbright Finland News magazine 2/2024!