I scoured Swedish national geodata catalogs, the Swedish County Administrative Board database, and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency for data about land use, forestry, and reindeer husbandry, and the Swedish Energy Authority for data on wind turbines. I also reached out to the Swedish Geological Survey (Bergsstaten) to obtain mining permit data.

I located the most recent data available for each research area.

Using this data for my project required translation from Swedish to English; translations are my own.

I selected by attribute to locate the municipalities comprising Norrbotten County.

I used the Intersect analysis tool to isolate data in Norrbotten County and find metal mining permits and existing and projected wind turbines within core reindeer herding areas and performed tree felling within Norrbotten County.

I converted forest cover data using the Raster to Polygon tool.

I used the Overlay Union analysis tool to join layers together, creating composite polygons and datasets.

In order to suggest regions the forestry should avoid when felling trees, I used the Buffer analysis tool, and used the Erase analysis tool to isolate the reindeer winter grazing areas outside my suggested buffer zone.

A shortcoming of my project is a lack of computed areas and summary statistics. I attempted to calculate summary statistics, but the Swedish data sets didn't have numeric data organized in a way compatible for the ArcGIS software. For ex. decimals points are input as commas rather than periods in the Swedish datasets, which doesn't allow for using the statistics analysis tools, and I couldn't figure out how to reformulate the numbers.

I created new feature datasets in order to digitize the Kiruna/Kirunavaara area and specify areas for zoom extent in the maps of wind turbines intersecting core reindeer areas.