Saving Stripes

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 27 2009 | By: savingstripes

A number of people have been commenting or asking about restoring degraded lands. Preventing degradation is one thing, but given that it’s happened in a lot of places already, how can we begin to put back the processes that have been lost? How long does it take, and can you ever get the land to fully recover?

The simple answer is: in theory, you can restore any land if you have enough labor and money. Even in a place where all the soil has eroded down to bedrock, you could, in theory, cart in truckloads of soil and manure from somewhere else. But who’s really going to do that in a place where people scarcely know where the next meal is coming from?

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some really simple and cheap things that people can do to stop further degradation and start letting the land recover. For example, one could lay down branches or put down rocks where erosion gullies are starting to form. A slightly more involved approach would be to plant grass seeds in small furrows dug into bare soil. Anything that stops water from flowing over the surface of the land is going to help prevent erosion and improve the conditions for grass to grow.

Of course, any restoration effort takes a lot of work and a lot of time. How much and how long depends on how degraded the land is. In some cases, just removing the cause of the degradation (for example, overgrazing) is enough for the land to recover. In other cases, for example where lots of topsoil has been lost, the ecosystem may never recover to what it was before – but it might at least be stabilized and improved to some extent.

I personally find restoration a really interesting subject – first, because it offers some hope and optimism that we can (at least to some extent) reverse our mistakes of the past, and, second, because it presents a fascinating challenge: to understand enough about the ecosystems we live in to know how to put them back together.

Next up: Siva is going to tell you a little about his recent work catching and collaring zebras!

-Corinna

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 20 2009 | By: savingstripes

After we returned from the Mara, we headed north – first to our home in Laikipia, and the next day on into Isiolo and Samburu districts. We had planned to reach the community of Il Ngwesi by late morning and spend several hours with them before driving on to our camping spot in Westgate community. But unfortunately we got quite lost on the way to Il Ngwesi and only reached there after 3 PM. We had no choice but to hold a short meeting with a small group of elders before pressing on. Even so, it was 9:30 PM by the time we reached our camping site in Westgate!

Thankfully, we had the whole next day to spend in Westgate. In the morning we had a sit-down meeting with a group of elders, and in the afternoon we went with them to visit several sites on the group ranch.

Like most of the region, the group ranch was mostly shrubs surrounded by bare soil. Yet, the elders remembered the place being a grassland when they were children. As we were discussing this at one site, Jeff, the soil scientist, picked up two handfuls of soil. The first was from the area between the shrubs, a light red color. The second was from under a shrub, where less soil had eroded, and was a darker red-brown. The elders pointed to the darker soil and said that when they were young, the soil here was even darker than that. From this, we were together able to conclude that the whole top layer of the original soil has probably been lost.

On a more optimistic note, we also visited a site where the community has done some rehabilitation. In areas badly taken over by Acacia reficiens – a nasty, thorny bush that makes a thicket with no grass beneath it – they had cut the bush and planted some grass seeds. The cut brush was strewn over the ground, protecting the tender grass seedlings from being eaten. Now, several years later, there was an appreciable amount of grass between the trees – a big improvement from the desert-like bare soil that was there before!

As we concluded our day at Westgate with a goat roast for the elders, we reflected on the previous week of meetings and places we’d visited. Two very positive things stood out to us. First, we were consistently impressed by how much the people we spoke with knew about the processes going on in their landscapes. This is not to belittle them, but rather to express how deep their knowledge and understanding is relative to many other land managers in other parts of the world. Second, we were also impressed by how many similar things we heard in each place. When we asked community members what indicators of land degradation they notice, their responses were remarkably consistent: more bare soil, less grass, more bush, less grass production, more erosion, more of the undesirable grasses (one species in particular was repeatedly cited) and fewer of the desirable grasses.

We returned home the next day with conflicted emotions: on the one hand, saddened by the severity and extent of land degradation we had seen, and on the hand, uplifted by the tremendous knowledge and understanding among the people we’d met – giving us hope that the degradation of the past might be reversed.

-Corinna

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 10 2009 | By: savingstripes

The past ten days we’ve been traveling around to various places in Kenya. We’ve not had much internet connection, so I’ll have to catch up on a lot of things in the next few posts! Meantime, Siva just started collaring zebras. He and the Kenya Wildlife Service veterinary team are out today for the first collaring session. Stay tuned about that!

When we left you last, we had just been to Magadi for a very long day trip (leaving Nairobi at 6:30 AM and returning at 9 PM). The next morning, Saturday, we boarded a Safarilink flight to the Maasai Mara. I have rarely had the chance to fly in Kenya, and I found it completely fascinating. My face was glued to the window as we flew over the descending, and then ascending, “steps” of the Great Rift Valley. My fascination with plate tectonics, however, was somewhat tempered by my dismay at how much bare soil I was seeing. The massive swaths of bare red soil and huge erosion ditches highlighted, yet again, the magnitude of the land degradation issues we are facing here in Kenya.

In the Mara, however, it was green and lush. Although the rains have not been good down there, there has at least been a bit of rain, and in many places the grass was quite tall. My impressions from our 26 hours there can be summarized by a few key thoughts.

First, oh my gosh, is it beautiful there! Wide open, rolling plains of grass dotted with zebras, gazelles, impala, elephants, giraffes, eland, and more. In many ways, the Mara is the classic African savanna, and it really is stunning and replete with life.

Second, in this productive environment, cattle and wildlife have the potential to live together in relative harmony. Deep inside the park, where cattle never go, the grass was so tall that there was hardly any wildlife (except buffalo, which like tall grass). Outside the park, where some Maasai communities have set up conservancies with some - but regulated - cattle grazing, the grass was shorter and the place was full of wildlife. This illustrates that, with good management and plenty of rainfall, it’s possible for livestock and wildlife to share the land.

My third impression had to do with what we went there to look at: indicators of rangeland health. We spent a lot of our time in the Mara talking to Dickson, a Maasai man from the area who did his M.Sc. work there. Dickson was a fantastic host and a fount of interesting information about how people assess the health of their animals and the land. We learned about “hot” and “cold” areas in the landscape – areas where animals perform better or worse. In some cases, Dickson told us, cows may put on weight in a cold area. but their calves don’t survive. We also learned about various behaviors the cows exhibit when they are satiated or still hungry for something. This intricate knowledge of the cattle was impressive and humbling to us researchers – since we use many of the same indicators to assess livestock and wildlife well-being.

Before we knew it, it was time to leave this magical land – back to Nairobi and on to places further north. More on that next time!

-Corinna

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