Issued on: 28/05/2026 - FRANCE24
Norway’s northern Lofoten Islands are attracting an increasing number of tourists, raising concerns about the environmental impact. To help document these effects, Norwegian researchers have launched a new project that utilises satellite images.
Steep peaks plunging into a turquoise sea…. Instagram is flooded with videos showcasing the beauty of the Lofoten Islands, highlighting "must-do" treks and "hidden gems" throughout the Norwegian archipelago.
Located north of the Arctic Circle, these islands attract over 1 million tourists each year – a number that is rising.
This video, published on Instagram on December 3, 2025, shows the Reinebringen hike, one of the popular tours in the Lofoten Islands.
However, the boom in tourism is also sparking fears about its environmental impact in a country where outdoor access is governed by the “right to roam”.
This concept – which allows anyone to hike or camp wherever they want – has been heavily marketed by the tourism industry, explains Elina Hutton, a tourism researcher at the Lofoten-based firm SALT.
But it also makes managing these natural sites a major challenge. “For example, we can’t have trail counters on every trail because that would be millions of counters around Norway. So we need to find tools.”
‘Tourism impact is already visible from space’
Satellite imagery could offer a solution. It is with this objective in mind that the SALT Trail 2.0 project, funded by the European Space Agency and conducted by SALT, was launched. Hutton, the project leader, explains how the initiative came to life:
“The whole idea started a few years ago. There was a trail in the region where I was working that had appeared just because lots of people went there to take the most Instagrammable photo of the place. And suddenly the trail also appeared on maps. We found out that anyone can add trails on OpenStreetMap, but it also uses satellite imagery to automatically map them. We realised that the impact of tourism is already visible from space.
At that time, it didn't go anywhere further. But then I thought, ‘How could we use this information? How much more can we actually see from space?’
We realised that we are spending a lot of resources trying to understand how many people visit us in nature. We have been using Strava [Editor’s note: an application for sports activity] and other data to try to understand if we don't have counters. But that data doesn't really tell us what the impact of the visitation is. Testing different methods, we realised that these satellite images actually show this damage that we're doing.”
The researchers first conducted tests with individual trails across Scandinavia, comparing images of the same locations captured years apart.
They use filters that measure the state of vegetation health based on how plants reflect light at different wavelengths. This highlights areas where vegetation has been damaged, revealing the appearance of informal paths.
Satellite images from July 15, 2025, showing Kvalvika, a popular site in Lofoten. The green filter measures the vegetation health. Copernicus 2026
The ongoing project is now trying to scale up by using AI and machine learning to analyse the entire Lofoten region and detect where and when new trails are appearing.
‘In the Arctic, nature is really fragile’
The project makes particular sense in the Arctic, Hutton says:
“In southern Scandinavia, there can be a trail that can tolerate thousands of people every year, and it recovers. But in Arctic Europe, trail recovery is really slow, and the nature is really fragile.
In the Arctic, the growth season is very short. There are about 100 days for nature to recover and grow before the season reaches the end of its cycle. That means that our plants adapted to very slow growth. They live very long and can skip bad years if the conditions are too cold. But that also means that when the damage happens, they still continue to grow equally slowly. So they can take decades to recover. For example, if you go to a place where there's no trail and 25 people walk in the same line, then the trail is visible for about 12 months. So the following year might still be there.”
Adding to this is the impact of climate change. “People think that the warmer climate is going to be easier for the vegetation, but it's actually not, because they are used to cold environments, so they can't tolerate so much heat,” Hutton says.
The researcher hopes that documenting this damage will help those who manage the trails identify the hardest-hit areas and those at risk in the future so they can take preventive action. “If something is not documented, it's really hard to prove to decision makers that the problem actually exists and to get money to fix the problem or prevent the problem.”
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