Abstract
Transhumant pastoralism is mobile livelihood strategy in which families and their herds move seasonally from lowlands, where they settle during the winter, towards the highlands, located in mountainous areas, during the summer. We propose a framework, rooted in a socio-environmental coevolutionary perspective, for the transhumant annual cycle as comprised by the winter-phase, the summer-phase, and movement transitions between them. The aim was to assess the level of synchrony between ecological phases and social phases and the benefit of moving between pasturelands in selected study cases from Patagonia, Argentina. Ecological phases were addressed by the difference between vegetation productivity of winter- and summer-lands, with Fourier transform applied to data series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Social phases were estimated by the proportion of annual time spent by pastoralists and their herds in each site and during transitions, respectively, obtained from interviews. The framework was sensitive to capturing differences across study cases. There was an observed tendency towards more synchronisation in the cases with closer distances and asynchrony in the cases with longer distances and longer movement transitions between pasturelands. Results are encouraging as a step towards the development of a monitoring system of both transhumant pastoralism activity and environmental changes.
Highlights
The integration of social and ecology sciences is emphatically required to attain sustainable development in arid and semiarid regions [1]
The overall annual benefit of the transhumant annual cycle (BTAC) was positive in most cases (Table 2), except for one in which both winter- and summer-land Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) series had similar dynamics and there was no crossing-over between them
In those cases where ecological phases could be accounted for, the relative benefit provided by the summer-phase (BESP) was similar or greater than the relative benefit provided by the winter-phase (BEWP) (Table 2; Figures 4–6)
Summary
The integration of social and ecology sciences is emphatically required to attain sustainable development in arid and semiarid regions [1]. Few research programs have explored questions through a coevolutionary framework and gained new insights, because empirical applications are still lacking [10] To overcome these difficulties, the same scholars insist that socio-environmental coevolutionary frameworks require identifying critical categories, bounding processes and defining analytical boundaries, by taking a pragmatic approach of engagement with empirical phenomena. Tackling the synchrony between the social and ecological phases of the annual cyclic transhumant movement is rooted in a widely documented empirical phenomenon about this kind of mobile systems. We propose that these phenomena are a result of a socio-environmental coevolutionary process
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