page_title: Fulufjället National Park
section_title: The plateau
hierarchical_section_title: Fulufjället National Park / Environment / The plateau
caption_attribution_description: Oenanthe oenanthe English: Northern Wheatear Français&#160;: Traquet motteux
context_page_description: Fulufjället National Park is a national park in central Sweden. Its total area is 385 km², located entirely within Älvdalen Municipality in the province of Dalarna. It is named after the mountain Fulufjället, 1,044 m high. It covers the Swedish part of the Fulufjället massif, which is the southernmost part of the Scandes in Sweden. The Norwegian part of the massif is protected by Norway's Fulufjellet National Park.
  The park is one of Sweden's most recent, inaugurated in September 2002 by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony attended by a few thousand spectators. The park has become one of the initial PAN Parks, an international project to combine preservation with tourism.
  The Fulufjället massif is a high plateau deeply gouged by several rivers that flow into the mighty river Dalälven, which, far downstream, creates the unique topography of Färnebofjärden National Park. The geography is dominated by lichen, bare mountains, and valleys with dense old-growth forest. The heaths of brush, grass and lichens are unique in the Scandinavian Mountains, a result of the absence of grazing reindeers.
context_section_description: Because of the weather and the poverty of the soil, the plateau is mostly heath and bare dirt with only a few common juniper shrubs and some moor birches. The principal vascular plants one encounters are snowbed willow, Alpine bearberry, Alpine hawkweed, crowberry, cowberry, blue whortleberry and alpine azalea. But that which renders the vegetation of the Fulufjället plateau particularly unique in Sweden is its richness in lichens, with in particular the vast carpets of reindeer lichen and of fönsterlav, not affected there by the pasture of domestic reindeer, unlike most of the Swedish mountains. It is also in these inaccessible areas that one finds Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce 9,550 yr (301,000 Ms) old, making it one of the oldest trees in the world.
  Few animals live in these areas; birds, mostly, such as the willow warbler, the meadow pipit, the northern wheatear, and these rarer ones: the European golden plover, the Eurasian dotterel, the snow bunting, and the Lapland longspur. The willow ptarmigan is relatively common, whereas the rock ptarmigan is found only on the highest peaks. For many of these species, Fulufjället is the southernmost part of their range in Sweden.
caption: Northern wheatear
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