Abstract
The region of Southern Ethiopia (Borana) and Northern Kenya (Marsabit) is characterised by erratic rainfall, limited surface water, aridity, and frequent droughts. An important adaptive response to these conditions, of uncertain antiquity, has been the hand-excavation of a sequence of deep wells at key locations often along seasonal riverbeds and valley bottoms where subterranean aquifers can be tapped. Sophisticated indigenous water management systems have developed to ensure equitable access to these critical water resources, and these are part of well-defined customary institutional leadership structures that govern the community giving rise to a distinctive form of biocultural heritage. These systems, and the wells themselves, are increasingly under threat, however, from climate change, demographic growth, and socio-economic development. To contribute to an assessment of the scale, distribution and intensity of these threats, this study aimed to evaluate the land-use land-cover (LULC) and precipitation changes in this semi-arid to arid landscape and their association with, and impact on, the preservation of traditional wells. Multitemporal Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellite imagery covering the period 1990 to 2020, analysed at a temporal resolution of 10 years, was classified using supervised classification via the Random Forest machine learning method to extract the following classes: bare land, grassland, shrub land, open forest, closed forest, croplands, settlement and waterbodies. Change detection was then applied to identify and quantify changes through time and landscape degradation indices were generated using the Shannon Diversity Index fragmentation index within a 15 km buffer of each well cluster. The results indicated that land cover change was mostly driven by increasing anthropogenic changes with resultant reduction in natural land cover classes. Furthermore, increased fragmentation has occurred within most of the selected buffer distances of the well clusters. The main drivers of change that have directly or indirectly impacted land degradation and the preservation of indigenous water management systems were identified through an analysis of land cover changes in the last 30 years, supporting insights from previous focused group discussions with communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. Our approach showed that remote sensing methods can be used for the spatially explicit mapping of landscape structure around the wells, and ultimately towards assessment of the preservation status of the indigenous wells.
Highlights
The use of remote sensing technologies for the detection of archaeological sites and monuments and other forms of tangible cultural heritage has increased significantly in recent decades, including on the African continent [1,2,3,4,5]
To demonstrate the potential of such approaches, this paper provides an assessment of the main directions of land-use land-cover (LULC) change across southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya over the last forty years and the threats such changes pose to the long-term conservation of indigenous wells and the heritage services they provide for the diverse pastoralist communities, notably Borana, Gabra, Rendille and Samburu, that have occupied this landscape for centuries
Kenya/Southern Ethiopia study region is key to understanding the linkages between landscape characteristics and indigenous hand-dug wells in the region and is fundamental in addressing issues related to these wells which are key resources for pastoral production, and have significant social, cultural, symbolic, and religious values for the indigenous populations inhabiting this semi-arid region
Summary
The use of remote sensing technologies for the detection of archaeological sites and monuments and other forms of tangible cultural heritage has increased significantly in recent decades, including on the African continent [1,2,3,4,5]. Remote sensing is increasingly used to map and monitor the environmental setting of heritage sites, and thereby assess the levels of risk arising from such factors as the indirect consequences of urban expansion, changing hydrological regimes, and sea level rise and associated coastal erosion [18,19,20,21,22]. There has been less use of remote sensing technologies to map and monitor examples of extant ‘biocultural heritage’, except where such heritage is located within designated protected areas such as national parks and heritage landscapes and subject to formalised management regimes. Because biocultural heritage remains in use by and under the control of descendants of its ancestral users and makers, changes to how such heritage is used and modifications to its environmental setting are inherent to everyday management
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