How technology can help mitigate effects of drought
Anastasia Wahome
Northern Kenya is home to pastoralist communities as well as wildlife conservancies.
The vast rangelands are arid or semi-arid. With the changing climatic conditions, including the unpredictable rainfall patterns, competition for pasture has increased considerably.
Water scarcity in the rangelands is also a source of great concern as the animals, both domestic and wild, cannot survive without it.
Lack of reliable information on the conditions of pasture and water availability has thus been a big challenge to pastoral communities and conservancies.
Although their desire would be to have information that would help them predict these conditions in a timely manner, the availability, accessibility and capacity to process it magnifies these challenges.
The northern rangelands are also infested with invasive species including Opuntia Stricta, the invasive acacia known as Acacia Reficiens and Prosopis Juliflora, also known as Mathenge, which are not palatable to animals.
Their evergreen characteristic, even during dry seasons, also gives false pasture conditions while derived satellite vegetation indices are used.
It is, therefore, important to know the location and spread of these plant species to avoid using misleading information.
To address the challenges, the pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Marsabit, Turkana, Wajir and Garissa counties have been working with Mercy Corps and Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) to conduct participatory mapping of grazing zones.
Using paper hand-made maps, they are assisted to use Satellite images to develop better and more accurate maps and trained on how to use them so that they can better manage the grazing areas.
This effort is aimed at equipping the communities with information on availability and condition of pasture so that they can make more informed decisions when moving cattle from one region to another in search of pasture and water.
These maps are also an important input in the county government ward planning processes, and assist in identification of priorities for investments.
National Drought and Management Authority has been engaged in identifying innovations for strengthening drought and early warning systems to improve responses to droughts.
In collaboration with the University of Sussex and RCMRD through the SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa project, development of a web-based Rangelands Decision Support Tool that includes vegetation conditions as well as short term vegetation forecasts provides the much-needed information to enable more accurate and timely decisions.
The forecasts are based on satellite-based vegetation data provided on a monthly basis.
The web-based tool facilitates near real time assessment and monitoring of rangeland resources and aggregates key indicators of rangelands productivity with ancillary data.
The users are able to select those indicators to produce maps at different administrative and conservancy boundaries.
The tool also incorporates maps on occurrence and spread of invasive species.
While some communities are already exploiting these plants for economic gain, knowing their location and the area covered also helps in enhancing mitigation measures as well and ensures higher accuracy of vegetation condition maps.
The collection of this data is done via a mobile app that enables local conservancy officers to map the occurrence of the invasive plants as they carry out their other daily operations within the conservancies.
While these efforts are not in themselves enough to address all the challenges faced by the pastoral communities and the conservancies, they address a critical component of utilising geospatial and earth observation data and technologies to support data driven decision making across the scale at national, county and community levels.
More activities by RCMRD in addressing societal challenges using earth observation and geospatial technologies will be highlighted in the upcoming International Conference from August 17-19, 2021. — The writer is the science and data lead, SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa
