While efforts to raise domesticated reindeer on the island stopped working, herds of wild reindeer succeed in East Iceland.
While the majority of the world’s populations of reindeer and caribou have actually decreased considerably in current years, Iceland’s herd is doing fine. Its population proliferated in current years and is now steady.
Reindeer were very first brought by royal decree from Norway to Iceland in the 1700 s after illness had actually eliminated about 60 percent of the island’s sheep population. Initially there was hope they might be domesticated and be kept farms. But early efforts at reindeer husbandry fizzled due to the severe winter seasons, competitors with sheep farmers, and absence of interest amongst Icelanders in raising the animals.
September 9, 2021
Nonetheless, wild reindeer grew in East Iceland, a location with lots of an essential kind of lichen (Cetraria islandica) for herds to take in. The population swelled from a couple of lots reindeer in the 1700 s to more than 5,000 now. Many of Iceland’s reindeer now invest much of their time in the summertime foraging in the highlands near Mount Sn æfell. When winter season weather condition shows up, they come down into warmer valleys closer to the ocean.
August 14, 2020
The Operational Land Imager ( OLI) on Landsat 8 recorded this picture of Mount Sn æfell and the surrounding location on September 9,2021 The Hálslón Reservoir lies to the west and the Vatnaj ökull ice field to the south. As seen in the 2nd image, the highland plateau north and northeast of Vatnaj ökull glacier is the only location in Iceland with constant plant life from the seaside to Vatnaj ökull. That image was gotten by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS) on NASA‘s Aqua satellite.
Limited grazing land can be an issue in Iceland due to the island’s long, cold winter seasons. Satellite observations of plant life– especially a procedure called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index ( NDVI)– are amongst the tools that scientists and wildlife supervisors utilize to keep track of the health of pastures and reindeer populations in East Iceland.
2014
Reindeer in East Iceland do not need to compete with any natural predators, parasitic flies, or mosquitoes. To keep reindeer populations in check, human hunters are allowed to eliminate about 1000– 1,300 of the animals each year.
“To prevent overgrazing, we keep the density of winter populations under one animal per square kilometer,” discussed Skarph éðinn Þórisson of the East Iceland NatureCentre “Most of the overgrazing that happens in Iceland is related to sheep farming—not reindeer—and happens mainly in areas other than East Iceland.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, utilizing Landsat information from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS information from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview Photograph by Darcy Moore.
