Traditional knowledge about how reindeer utilize forage resources was expected to be crucial to reindeer herders. Seventeen Sami reindeer herders in four reindeer herding communities in Sweden ("samebyar" in Swedish) were interviewed about plants species considered to be important reindeer food plants in scientific literature. Among 40 plant species, which the informants were asked to identify and indicate whether and when they were grazed by reindeer, they identified a total of 21 plant taxa and five plant groups. They especially recognised species that were used as human food by the Sami themselves, but certain specific forage plants were also identified. Detailed knowledge of vascular plants at the species level was surprisingly general, which may indicate that knowledge of pasture resources in a detailed species level is not of vital importance. This fact is in sharp contradiction to the detailed knowledge that Sami people express for example about reindeer (as an animal) or snow (as physical element). The plausible explanation is that observations of individual plant species are unnecessarily detailed information in large-scale reindeer pastoralism, because the animals graze freely under loose herding and border surveillance. Introduction Like other traditional subsistence uses of natural resources, reindeer husbandry is part-ly based on a body of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). TEK often tends to be per-ceived as qualitative and categorical in charac-ter and with significant detailed knowledge of central phenomena or occurrences (e.g. Berlin, 1992; Berkes, 1999; Berkes et al., 2000; Usher, 2000), such as snow conditions and charac-teristics of animals in the context of reindeer husbandry. Phenomena that have not been important for human survival are described in significantly less details. The richness of details is often tied to the culture-bearing language used in the daily work, in this case Sami which is known for its extensive terminology for de-scribing many natural phenomena (e.g., Ru-ong, 1964, 1968; Collinder, 1984; Eythorsson, 1993; Jernsletten, 1997; Ryd, 2001; Helander-Renvall, 2007). Because of their long interaction with rein-deer, the Sami undoubtedly have an intimate knowledge about reindeer as animals and their behaviour and movements in the landscape at different spatial scales (e.g. Aronsson, 1991; Storli, 1993). It could be hypothesized that the change from hunting to intensive reindeer pas-toralism 4-5 centuries ago (Paine, 1994) may have altered the focus from animals towards Introduction Movement is one of the most striking features of the ecology of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus). The species inhabits the highly sea-sonal circumpolar environment, and typically follows greening vegetation by migrating from lichen-rich winter habitat with relatively little