| Summary: | The last remaining populations of wild mountain reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) in Europe, live in mountain ranges in southern-Norway. A network of infrastructure such as roads, railways, tourist cottages, and popular hiking trails has resulted in substantial habitat loss and severe fragmentation and isolation of the populations, with the potential to significantly hinder reindeer migrations. There is an urgent need for visitor capacity planning in a way that minimalize these negative effects on wild reindeer. This paper must be read with the realization that there are many different sources of change within themes such as land use-protection dilemmas, and that management is moving into a more goal-oriented and retrospectively measurable practice as compared to earlier regulation-oriented management strategies. Similarly, as the concept of protected areas is shifting from “total protection” to “sustainable use”, a much deeper understanding of wild reindeer ecology and response to anthropogenic disturbance is urgently needed to support sustainable and more flexible management strategies within their ranges. This is particularly important and challenging as current political strategies aim at increasing the commercial exploitation of protected areas while preserving suitable reindeer habitat. For this aim, we provide here a more specific and comprehensive understanding of reindeer responses to human presence. At the same time, we provide a description of the phenomena of human use of wild reindeer ranges, as well as the theoretical ground to understand the motivation for people to visit these ranges. Based on an understanding of the human presence and the reasons for their behavior, we are better able to carry out a management that in a better way protect reindeer habitat from disturbance and at same time provide good experiences for the visitors. We provide a simple model describing the relationship between nature experiences/visitation, wild reindeer disturbance responses and measurements to improve the management in vulnerable wild reindeer ranges.
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