Solving the conflict between reindeer herding and forestry in northern Sweden – new approaches linking indigenous local knowledge, retrospective landscape data and adapted forest management

Reindeer herding and forestry are the dominant, overlapping and competing forms of land use in northern Sweden.

While reindeer herding have a long history of spatially broad but low intense land use, forestry is more recent and have developed from exploitation of timber to high intense modern forestry over the past 150-years.

Reindeer herding and forestry existed in parallel for more than a century, but the conflict between forestry and reindeer herding has increased dramatically.

The reason is intensification of forest management and subsequent changes to the ecosystem to the disadvantage of reindeer herding.The overall aim of this project is to challenge the traditional forestry narrative, analyse the forest landscape and then provide new functional tools for improved forestry practices in northern Sweden.

We will identify and visualize the values and perspectives of Sami reindeer herding in relation to the forest landscape (WP1), then compile and analyse temporal changes of forest landscapes from a reindeer herding perspective with multiple data sources (WP2), and finally bridge the conflict between forestry and reindeer herders by providing ILK (indigenous local knowledge) and practical tool/models to the forestry sector (WP 3).

It will be a PhD-project and we will aim to recruit a student with competence from forestry and reindeer herding. The project will be conducted in collaboration with the Sámi reindeer herding communities Luokta Mavas and Váhtjer.