This Archipelago Saved an Entire Species of Reindeer From Extinction
Recently, native reindeer populations have been on the rise in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
A team of researchers spent three years walking across the tundra to gather data including population information and dispersal rates.
While the reindeer population is healthy and thriving at the moment, several factors, including climate change, can wreak havoc on the fragile ecosystem and in turn, the animals.
The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard has become a haven for the native reindeer subspecies, Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus, who a mere 100 years ago, nearly went extinct.
The small chain of islands off the Norwegian coast in the Arctic Ocean have seen reindeer populations surge recently thanks, in part, to a hunting ban that has also attributed to improved dispersal rates. However, populations take several years to recover from overhunting and today's Svalbard reindeer still feel those repercussions as their numbers slowly rise.
Mathilde Le Moullec, one of the researchers on the team and a postdoctoral student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, was surprised to find that the Svalbard reindeer population was over 22,000 strong.
“[They] are twice more numerous than what was thought,” Le Moullec told Inverse.
How did Le Moullec and company find this figure? They used a combination of distance sampling and manual counting to create a figure that represented the distribution of the reindeer across the archipelago.
The team also used previously recorded population figures and radiocarbon dating on reindeer bones to estimate how many reindeer roamed the islands even before humans set foot on them.
For now, the creatures have evaded extinction, but that doesn’t mean that this population will remain stable. A study published by Le Moullec et al. in the Journal of Wildlife Management, says that the reindeer face other threats to their survival in the form of "harvesting, landscape fragmentation, and climate change."
Le Moullec also notes that "warm spells" will affect food availability for the Svalbard which could drastically mess with their population. Additionally, receding Arctic ice also presents a problem as it could isolate groups of reindeer from each other, making it difficult to recolonize populations if necessary.
Source: Inverse
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