Reconstructing long-term impacts of climate change on Arctic reindeer herds

Project overview

Herd herbivores, such as reindeers, are essential components of Arctic ecosystems. They play important roles in sustaining local food webs, maintaining terrestrial ecosystems and acting as food sources for Indigenous peoples. However, the viability of reindeer herding in the Arctic under current and projected climate change is cause for concern. Historical reindeer population records collected since the 1960’s have highlighted that most herds are in decline (Vors and Boyce, 2009). Increased reindeer mortality rates are linked to factors such as increased thaw-refreezing events that form impenetrable ground surface ice layers and prevent access to vegetation food sources, competition with other land users and changes in food web. Reindeer population pressures will continue to increase under projected climate warming, however, their resilience to climate change remains unknown.

This project aims to assess the resilience of current reindeer herds in the Finnish sub-Arctic to environmental changes by developing long-term records of reindeer populations and climate from naturally accumulating lake sediments. The project will use geochemical analyses to develop multi-proxy records of environmental change. Full training will be provided in a range of geochemical techniques (e.g. XRF, stable isotopes, carbon:nitrogen ratios and biomarkers), which can be tailored to meet the student’s research interests. This work will be conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Notre Dame University, US. Eligible applicants can apply to the Durham Inspired Climate Change and Polar Research Scholarship for funding support for this project. For further details, please contact Dr Helen Mackay.

If you are interested in this project, please contact the lead supervisor:

Dr Helen Mackay

Helen.mackay@durham.ac.uk

Key references

Last, W.M. and Smol, J.P. (2001). Tracking environmental change using lake sediments. Physical and Geochemical Methods. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47670-3

Vors, L.S. and Boyce, M.S. 2009. Global declines of caribou and reindeer. Global Change Biology 15, 11, 2626-2633. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01974.x.