Reindeer Herds In Trouble - Winter Lichens Increasingly Coated By Ice As Climate Breaks Down - AFP

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On Norway's border with Russia, the consequences of climate change are affecting the reindeer population as rising temperatures hit food stocks and industry growth eats into vital grazing land. "Over the past three years, I've had to give some hay to my 800 reindeer during the coldest months. It's more expensive and it gives me more work," said Jan Egil Trasti, a reindeer herder from the native Sami people.

The reason: the lichen his animals graze on has become tougher to find as winter temperatures rise. The snow thaws, and along with rain, then freezes anew -- covering the ground in layers impervious to all but the most tenacious reindeer. Grazing land is also disappearing under the weight of industry as buildings, pipelines, roads and other infrastructure increasingly dot old pastures.

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In this month of November, just weeks ahead of a key UN climate summit in Denmark, snow has not yet blanketed the flora in the Far North. Indeed temperatures in this region near the Barents Sea are unseasonably mild, above zero degrees Celsius. In the past, when the snows have come, they have generally fallen on dry ground, whereas now they fall on lichen engorged with water. Trasti is no scientist, and environmental experts hesitate to link specific weather events to long-term climate change, but trends over the last several decades have clearly shown the Arctic hit hard by global warming.

In September, a study in the journal Science reported dramatic effects on animals in the Arctic due to a one-degree Celsius warming over the past 150 years. The Arctic tends to warm three times faster than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification -- a separate study in the same journal noted that summer temperatures were some 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than they should have been by the year 2000. Jonathan Colman, specialist in "reindeer ecology" at the University of Oslo, explained that sometimes "there's wet ice in the lichen." "It gets into their stomachs and they can't digest the food."

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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Global_warming_a_growing_threat_to_Arctic_reindeer_999.html