The role of public involvement in wildlife‐livestock conflicts: The case of Narok ranchers in Kenya
Abstract Economic activity associated with wildlife is an important source of foreign exchange in Kenya. Not surprisingly, the needs and interests of those involved in this sector are given due consideration. The exception is the farmers and ranchers who live among the wildlife and whose cooperation is necessary for maintaining this resource. As a result, farmers and ranchers have developed increasingly negative attitudes toward wildlife. On the basis of field study data collected in the Narok District of Kenya, the article argues that ranchers have in the past derived traditional and economic uses from wildlife and that their acquired negative attitude is a result of their exclusion from involvement in the design and planning of wildlife projects and policies. Four strategies for dealing with this potential conflict and incorporating ranchers and farmers into the wildlife economic sector are discussed: (1) involving the ranchers in planning and implementing wildlife projects, (2) strengthening wildlife e...
Communities and contrasting values attached to pasture weeds: the case of the Maasai and Kamba peoples in south-east Kenyan rangelands
More than 20% of Kenya’s population lives on rangelands, which account for over 80% of the total landmass and support more than 50% of the national livestock herd. As these areas have experienced a major livestock (cattle) productivity decline due to encroachment on pastures by woody weeds, government efforts are targeted at increasing palatable grass cover. Paradoxically, these efforts have been less than successful, as some communities do not identify some weeds as a nuisance, in fact ascribing value to them. To identify specifically what such values are, as well as perceived problems with woody weeds, interviews were conducted with 165 respondents in two distinct ethnic groups (Maasai and Kamba) practising different production systems within the Kenyan rangelands. We found that the groups had complex attitudes toward “woody weeds”, seeing both negative and positive aspects to them. Both groups thought predominately that woody weeds lowered grass quantity and quality. Both communities appreciated some weeds as forage for livestock and sources of firewood, while variations existed between the two communities in their use of woody weeds for construction, bee forage and soil conservation. It is concluded that woody plants on these rangelands cannot be exclusively be classified as weeds, but rather need to be included in systems of rangeland management.
Ocean predictive skill assessments in the South Atlantic: Crowd-sourcing of student-based discovery
Autonomous Underwater Gliders have over a decade long history of successful regional deployments serving scientific, societal and security needs in application areas ranging from pole to pole and including the full range of water depths from shallow coastal seas to the deep ocean. Glider deployments covering the basin scale are much fewer, but are a growing capacity as demonstrated by the Woods Hole to Bermuda line that crosses the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic Crossing line that follows the Gulf Stream, and the basin circling flights now being conducted as part of the Challenger Glider Mission. The next step in the evolution of the global Challenger mission is to enable an ensemble of modelers from different institutions and agencies to participate in a meaningful way. This process with be formalized in 2014 by leveraging the data management tools of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the education tools of the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Ocean Observing Initiative (OOI). The Education Visualization (EV) tools developed by the OOI's Education and Public Engagement (EPE) Implementing Organization (IO) are currently being configured through the cyber OOI net to display real time OOI glider data with intuitive interactive browser-based tools, reducing the barriers for student participation in sea exploration and discovery. Through U.S. IOOS, forecast ocean data will be harvested from the ephemeral ocean snapshots produced by an ensemble of ocean models along the same glider tracks as Challenger. The parallel observed and forecast datasets, both evolving in real time, will be accessible through the same OOI EV tools, enabling student participation in a crowd-sourced ocean predictive skill experiment. The result will satisfy one of the important goals of the Challenger mission by enabling students to assess of the quality of the ensemble of available global scale ocean models. Student research team projects that use the new model data comparison capabilities will be conducted during the summer of 2014. Students will compare an ensemble of the global ocean models along the high velocity transport pathways by gliders on basin-scale missions, such as one that traverses the northern side of the South Atlantic gyre along the Brazilian shelfbreak. The lasting impact of the Challenger mission will be a global fleet available to respond to events, an assessment of the ocean models along the fastest ocean transport pathways, and the establishment of a network of gliderports for global response.