Shieling Areas: Historical Grazing Pressures and Landscape Responses in Northern Iceland Jennifer L. Brown & Ian A. Simpson & Stuart J. L. Morrison & W. Paul Adderley & Eileen Tisdall & Orri Vésteinsson Published online: 15 February 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Abstract 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 contrib- uting to the overall resilience of livestock farming. Keywords Shieling areas . Grazing . Land degradation . Iceland . Landscape sensitivity . Resilience Introduction Iceland is commonly regarded as one of the most degraded lands in Europe, with 73% of its 102,721 km 2 affected by soil erosion, 16.2% of which is categorised as severe or very severe (Arnalds et al. 2001). The onset and acceleration of this land degradation has been associated with the introduction of domestic livestock and north-European grazing management practices by Norse settlers from circa AD 870 (e.g. Arnalds and Barkarson 2003; Einarsson 1994) with the summer grazing of shieling areas in farm estates (Icelandic: sel) as one element of historic grazing practices. Shieling areas in Iceland were normally located in the outfields, on the edge of farm estates and often at moderate to high altitudes, where milking livestock were taken from the middle of June until the later half of August. In these areas, animals were milked and dairy products manufactured (Sveinbjarnardóttir 1991). The rest of the livestock were kept in communal highland grazing areas (Icelandic: affrétir) until early autumn when they were gathered and sorted, often through communal effort (Aldred 2006). After the autumn slaughter that provided the food necessary for winter, the remaining livestock were grazed closer to the farmstead, an area that had remained relatively free from grazing over the summer. Depending on snow cover during the winter months, livestock would be housed and be partially or completely fed with fodder gathered during summer. A previous study on the complex relationships between historic grazing pressures and landscape responses has considered communal summer grazing areas in southern Iceland and has revealed that there was generally suffi- cient vegetation biomass production and regulation of communal areas to support livestock numbers (Simpson et al. 2001). This study suggested that failure to remove the livestock from the areas before the end of the growing season and the absence of shepherding were more likely to have contributed to land degradation than absolute numbers. Similar analyses assessing historic winter grazing areas in northeast Iceland identified adaptive grazing management J. L. Brown : I. A. Simpson (*) : S. J. L. Morrison : W. P. Adderley : E. Tisdall Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland, UK e-mail: i.a.simpson@stir.ac.uk O. Vésteinsson Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland Hum Ecol (2012) 40:81–99 DOI 10.1007/s10745-011-9456-1