The Maasai Mara Ecosystem (MME) is one of the key wildlife areas in Kenya and has more wildlife than any other part of the country. However, aerial surveys by the Department for Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing (DRSRS) show that Mara lost 60% of it’s resident wildlife in the last 25 years. As human populations grow, and crop farming expands and land privatizes, these pressures will only grow.

Little of the current focus on landscape fragmentation has focused on rangelands or pastoral lands. This paper investigates the existing evidence for causes and processes of fragmentation in pastoral lands and its effects of landscapes and peoples. More conceptual work is needed on the definition of loss and fragmentation, particularly efforts to clarify fragmentation from whose (or what's) perspective.

Presents workshop papers & discussion summaries on the development of low-level aerial survey techniques and presents applications to livestock, wildlife and land-use surveys. Reviews survey designs and sampling procedures as well as problems of bias, levels, from ground survey to satellite imagery; along w. recommendations for further research and cooperation.

About 14 % of the world's cattle and 21 % of its sheep and goats are found in Africa on a land base that comprises 25 % of the world's total area of rangelands. Most of these rangelands are or have in the past been managed under traditional systems of communal tenure. Regrettably, the wide variety of institutional arrangements, structures of governance and incentives that characterise these common property regimes have not been well understood or been the subject of much analysis.

This paper identifies sixteen cases of large-scale actions in the agriculture and forestry sectors that have adaptation and/or mitigation outcomes, and distils lessons from the cases. The cases cover policy and strategy development (including where climate-smart objectives were not the initial aim), climate risk management through insurance, weather information services and social protection, and agricultural initiatives that have a strong link to climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Key lessons learned include:

The spatial distribution of crops and farming systems in Africa is determined by the duration of the period during which crop and livestock water requirements are met. The length of growing period (LGP) is normally assessed from weather station data—scarce in large parts of Africa—or coarse-resolution rainfall estimates derived from weather satellites. In this study, we analyzed LGP and its variability based on the 1981–2011 GIMMS NDVI3g dataset. We applied a variable threshold method in combination with a searching algorithm to determine start- and end-of-season.