Bilal Butt

Pastoral Herd Management, Drought Coping Strategies, and Cattle Mobility in Southern Kenya

Livestock mobility facilitates opportunistic grazing management strategies that pastoralists employ to counter environmental variability in rangelands. One such strategy is moving livestock to temporary camps that are closer to areas of underutilized forage during times of drought. In areas where pastoralists graze near large protected areas, movement into protected areas, where both forage quantity and quality are higher, is also a common strategy. The aim of this study is to test hypotheses of herd relocation and effects of seasonality and herd size on spatially explicit parameters of cattle mobility for Maasai pastoralists along the northern border of a protected area in Kenya. Modified Global Positioning System (GPS) collars were placed on cattle from ten Maasai households that recorded three parameters of mobility for hundreds of grazing orbits from August 2005 to August 2006. Data were grouped by two constraints—seasonality and herd size—and tested against the two types of enclosure locations (temporary camps and permanent settlements). Hypotheses were formed on the basis of the current knowledge within the literature and analyzed using a series of analyses of variance. Results suggest that household relocation reduces the stress faced by pastoralists and their cattle during the drought by (1) lowering the average total daily distance and time traveled by cattle, (2) directing cattle toward the protected area, and (3) concentrating cattle grazing in distinct areas within the protected area. Herd size was found to have no effect on duration of travel for pastoralists that choose not to relocate during the drought. The research demonstrates how the use of modified low-cost GPS collars can be an effective tool for capturing parameters of mobility and for inferring pastoralist–livestock–rangeland relationships.

Clarifying competition: the case of wildlife and pastoral livestock in East Africa

Contentious debates surrounding the relationship between peoples’ livelihoods and protected areas in East Africa have largely revolved around claims and counter-claims about the level of competition between pastoral livestock and wildlife. Habitat and dietary overlap are often cited as the primary mechanism by which competition occurs with both overlap and lack of overlap (displacement) used as evidence of competition. Despite the importance of this issue for the economic and environmental futures of the region, there has been little scientific progress for understanding the nature of livestock–wildlife competition in pastoral landscapes. This article seeks to add conceptual clarity to this debate by focusing attention on exploitation competition in ways that are relevant to dryland East Africa. The article begins by briefly reviewing the changing understandings of the concept of competition in ecology. Requirements of competition, as defined in the literature, are then related to the ecological characteristics of East African drylands. By demonstrating that competition necessarily occurs through vegetative responses, we argue that there is the need to clarify competition by differentiating between ‘proximate competition’ and competition that is mediated by vegetation change across seasons. The article concludes by outlining the implications of these clarifications for the management and study of livestock–wildlife interactions.

Q Fever Risk Across a Dynamic, Heterogeneous Landscape in Laikipia County, Kenya

Two hundred fourteen serosamples were collected from four livestock species across five ranches in Laikipia County, Kenya. Serological analysis for Coxiella burnetii (the causative agent for Q fever) showed a distinct seroprevalence gradient: the lowest in cattle, higher in sheep and goats, and the highest in camels. Laikipia-wide aerial counts show a recent increase in the camel population. One hundred fifty-five stakeholder interviews revealed concern among veterinary, medical, ranching, and conservation professionals about Q fever. Local pastoralists and persons employed as livestock keepers, in contrast, revealed no knowledge of the disease. This work raises questions about emerging Q fever risk in Laikipia County and offers a framework for further integrative disease research in East African mixed-use systems.

Variation in vegetation cover and livestock mobility needs in Sahelian West Africa

A new approach was developed to evaluate the implications of the spatiotemporal variability of green vegetation for the dispersion of livestock that is required to access quality forage in semi-arid Africa. Maximum NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) at 1 km2 resolution was determined for concentric rings (0–31 km radii) around 227 individual sample locations within the study area for 14 dates (between 1 April to 1 November) annually over the 2000–2010 period. A sigmoidal curve was fitted to points within the maximum NDVI × distance radii space to determine the asymptote distance (AD) – the radius at which further dispersion from the sample location does not lead to significant gains in access to green forage. AD was found to: increase with latitude (or increasing aridity); decline as the rainy season proceeds; and show no trend over the 2000–2010 period. These results introduce much-needed empirical data to current debates surrounding the scales of governance to support livestock mobility.

The Trouble with Savanna and Other Environmental Categories, Especially in Africa

Environmental categories are simplifications of reality meant to enable generalization, which is necessary to produce predictive physical geographic knowledge. We argue here that these categories are social constructions related to ideas shared broadly in society, including environmental deterministic explanations of human difference. The biophysical, philosophical, and sociocultural problems associated with environmental categories are exemplified by ‘savanna’ in Africa. Examining environmental categorization is an important point of engagement in critical physical geography because it is a social process, explicitly centered on simplification and generalization, and significant broadly across scientific practice and society.