Reindeer populations across the Arctic will likely decline substantially due to climate change in the next several decades with the North American population facing the highest risk, researchers predict.
While the species has survived multiple periods of Arctic warming, climate change has already contributed to the loss of nearly two-thirds of the global populations of reindeer in the last three decades, according to the research team, led by the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
There are about 9 million reindeer globally, including those that are domesticated, according to the World Population Review.
The North American wild reindeer, also called caribou and estimated at around 3.5 million by the World Population Review, are most at risk from a warming climate, the researchers said. Caribou are found in Alaska and Canada.
The caribou populations could decline by up to 80% by 2100, “unless there are major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and increased investment in wildlife management and conservation,” Damien Fordham, an associate professor and deputy director of the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, said in a statement.
Lance King / Getty Images
The researchers came to their conclusion by examining how reindeer have responded to past climate events.
“Using fossils, ancient DNA and computer models, we reconstructed changes in the abundance and distribution of reindeer over the past 21,000 years at resolutions never done before, and we directly compared these to future predictions,” lead researcher Elisabetta Canteri said in a statement.
They found that populations of reindeer have declined during past periods of “rapid climate warming.”
“But the losses expected in the coming decades due to future climate change are likely to be even more severe than those in the past,” Canteri said.
A decline in reindeer populations also could have wider ecological implications because the animals help maintain plant diversity in the tundra.
“A reduction in tundra plant diversity resulting from the loss of reindeer and caribou will have many cascading effects, including reduction of carbon storage in Arctic soils,” said Eric Post, a professor at the University of California Davis who contributed to the research. “Continued losses will likely further exacerbate climatic warming through release of soil carbon to the atmosphere, which of course would further threaten reindeer and caribou as well as ourselves.”