Wild reindeer foraging-niche organization

Part 1: Diet selection was studied on free-ranging reindeer fitted with an esophageal fistula (EF) and by analysis of rumen samples from reindeer shot in the field. Plant density was assessed from quadrats on field plots. Three measures of palatability were used, the nitrogen, fiber, and total non structural carbohydrate (TNC) contents of samples from clipped vegetation. As lichen density decreased the EK reindeer included progressively more vascular litter and pieces of winter dormant species in their diet. Diets with highest TNC and N/F and the lowest fiber, providing the most readily digestible diets, were selected. The combined density-quality criterion gave the best prediction of their diets. In summer, forbs, and to some extent grasses and dwarf shrubs, were selected. Plants of highest density and in an early growth phase gave the best prediction of summer diets. In winter the variety of vascular plants utilized increased with increasing herd size and decreasing density of lichens in the vegetation. The width of diets was a function of diversity of available plants. It is suggested that dietary selection by reindeer has been a three stage process: evolution of a gastro-intestinal system capable of digesting lichens containing secondary compounds, behavioural tracking of the plant production pulse, and diet width scaling according to density-quality of all potential foods. Part 2: Wild reindeer closely followed the wave of vascular plant production in spring and summer with a significant correlation being found between the daily foraging time per habitat type and the highest concentration of green phytomass. Snow-bed meadows were the most consistently selected vegetation type by the four herds studied, viz. Hardangervidda, Snøhetta, Prudhoe Bay, and Svalbard, during the summer. Habitat niche-breadths were narrow during the winter, largely due to the limitation of access to the food supply by the snow-cover, broadened as the landscape became clear of snow, narrowed again with the initiation of plant growth and broadened once more as the wave of plant production reached all habitat types. At high levels of food resources the alpine herd (Hardangervidda) narrowed the feeding niche breadth (or adopted a selective feeding strategy) as the habitat niche breadth increased. The high arctic herd (Svalbard) living in the least productive environment, at the same time of year adopted a generalist feeding strategy as their habitat niche breadth expanded. Part 3: In this part the temporal organization of a low-alpine herd of reindeer (Hardangervidda) is described, and subsequently compared with those of two arctic herds. Their foraging efficiencies under different degrees of food availability were analysed, in order to test the hypothesis that food intake changes in response to the prevailing state of the food resources. The number of daily feeding bouts increased from 2 to 6 as the diet changed from the winter to the summer pasturage. Strong winds in winter and insect harassment in summer severely depressed the daily time spent foraging. When these environmental factors were accounted for no significant inter-seasonal differences in daily foraging time of the low alpine herd were found; on average 50% of each day was spent grazing, of which 78% of the time was spent on actual ingestion (feeding rate). The feeding rate within the active periods varied with the snow-depth, due to the need to dig a food crater in the snow and due to the particular selective feeding strategy adopted. The data from the present and from other studies suggest that the foraging efficiency of wild reindeer, expressed as their daily food intake follows a Holling type II functional response as food availability changes. Part 4: Sheep is the only sympatric ruminant which grazes with the reindeer on alpine pastures in Norway. The inter-specific niche relationships ot the wild reindeer and the domestic sheep in summer were studied on part of the western Hardangervidda. to test the hypothesis of inter-specific competition. Three niche dimensions were meas-ured, diel, habitat utilization, and spatial distribution. The estimates of the degree of overlap obtained suggest that this is relatively high for diet and habitat utilization but low for spatial distribution, which leads to a low degree of foraging interference. Since the intensity of both interspeeific and intra-specific competition depends on the ratio of the herbivore densities to the food resource density, the degree ol overlap in utilization by the two species tell us nothing about the degree of competition. Present numbers of both species on Hardangervidda have a beneficial influence on the vegetation, by opening-up the shrub-layer canopy and thus facilitating the main-tenance of grasses and forbs in the field layer, which has a higher carrying capacity for ruminants. The balance between the beneficial effects and inter-generic competition (if any) deriving from the present-day stocking rales is so tar unknown. Only long-term monitoring of the performance of both populations will shed light on this competitive aspect.