Introduction

The aim of NOMAD is to establish mobile field-stations for long-term monitoring and comparison of human-reindeer (rangifer) interactions in the subarctic zone. By placing an interdisciplinary team in close contact with migrating reindeer herds, NOMAD aims at achieving an innovative field method of data gathering, evaluation, and availability to the research and reindeer user community on a circum-arctic level.

By establishing a mobile observation facility (a "nomadic research camp") researchers use the same practice of following herds that most reindeer users themselves have used for centuries. NOMAD involves reindeer users in its work, thereby ensuring the continual functioning of the camp as well as communication and co-ordination with the reindeer-herding community. Compared to existing practices of fixed-point monitoring, a mobile research station permits more comprehensive observation of the changing environment.

The pattern of resource use by the human-reindeer complex is fine-tuned to even minute changes, and is quickly responsive to socio-economic and environmental processes, i.e. traditional summer pastures are becoming calving grounds, the migration responds to a changing seasonal rhythm, etc. The research team carries out monitoring of the impact of socio-economic and climate change on the human-reindeer complex -- state of the herd and grazing range; response and resilience of reindeer-dependent communities, etc. -- corresponding coping strategies, and changing modes of resource management.

NOMAD will render the observations in an Expedition Diary. Photographs and diary entries are broadcast in regular sessions from the camp to the "home base" at the MPI in Halle and then presented on this website (see the NOMAD Blog and Forum). 

The long-term goal is that a network of such camps and their respective websites will be able to provide a global information exchange on current change/resilience situations related to the human-reindeer complex.

(Yulian Konstantinov, August 2006)

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