Shieling Areas: Historical Grazing Pressures and Landscape Responses in Northern Iceland

Historical domestic livestock grazing in sensitive landscapes has commonly been regarded as a major cause of land degradation in Iceland. Shieling areas, where milking livestock were taken to pasture for the summer, represented one element of grazing management and in this paper we consider the extent to which historical shieling-based grazing pressure contributed to land degradation. Based on a grazing model to assess pressures and tephrochronology -based soil accumulation rates allied to micromorphology as a proxy for land degradation, our findings suggest that the shieling sy stem contributed to the maintenance of upland vegetation cover and related productivity levels without causing land degradation from settlement through to ca. AD 1300. As land degradation accelerated from ca. AD 1477 it is likely that shieling management continued to operate effectively contributing to the overall resilience of livestock farming.