Abstract
The savannas of the Kenya-Tanzania borderland cover >100,000 km2 and is one of the most important regions globally for biodiversity conservation, particularly large mammals. The region also supports >1 million pastoralists and their livestock. In these systems, resources for both large mammals and pastoralists are highly variable in space and time and thus require connected landscapes. However, ongoing fragmentation of (semi-)natural vegetation by smallholder fencing and expansion of agriculture threatens this social-ecological system. Spatial data on fences and agricultural expansion are localized and dispersed among data owners and databases. Here, we synthesized data from several research groups and conservation NGOs and present the first release of the Landscape Dynamics (landDX) spatial-temporal database, covering ~30,000 km2 of southern Kenya. The data includes 31,000 livestock enclosures, nearly 40,000 kilometres of fencing, and 1,500 km2 of agricultural land. We provide caveats and interpretation of the different methodologies used. These data are useful to answer fundamental ecological questions, to quantify the rate of change of ecosystem function and wildlife populations, for conservation and livestock management, and for local and governmental spatial planning.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThe Kenya – Tanzania borderlands cover roughly 100,000 km[2] spanning the rangelands between southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (Fig. 1)
This region is one of the most biodiverse in the world and contains some of Earth’s highest densities of large mammals[1,2]. The value they generate through tourism, the region has some 16 national parks and forest reserves stretching from the Serengeti and Maasai Mara in the
The digitization of fences was done manually based on visual interpretation using ArcMap 10.3.1, by looking at characteristic homogeneous areas using three different colour composites as well as a version based on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)
Summary
The Kenya – Tanzania borderlands cover roughly 100,000 km[2] spanning the rangelands between southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (Fig. 1). Extensive pastoralism and wildlife are under threat, on the Kenyan side of the border Both suffer from the negative effects of fragmentation[5] driven by complex processes including policy change, economic drivers, and globalization, which have encouraged and driven subdivision and fencing, and the expansion of subsistence and mechanized agriculture[6,7,8]. There have been many attempts to map these changes, including mapping of fencing, livestock enclosures (bomas), wildlife numbers, agricultural expansion, and habitat change[7,8,15,16,17,18] These data are useful for a range of applications: to answer fundamental ecological questions, to quantify the rate of change of ecosystem function, pastoralists strategies, and wildlife populations - especially wildlife mobility, for conservation planning and miti gating threats to wildlife, for livestock management and planning, and local and governmental spatial planning. Livestock Enclosures (Boma) Agriculture Fences KWT SORALO Aarhus a b www.nature.com/scientificdata c c
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