article · Scientific Reports
Communal grazing land in East Africa is undergoing rapid change due to land privatisation and fencing. The Greater Mara encompasses 668,500 hectares, serving as a critical area for large mammal migrations and Maasai pastoralist traditions. Analysis of multispectral satellite imagery spanning 1985 to 2016 reveals that fencing has expanded at an unprecedented and accelerating speed. In the most heavily fenced conservancies, the proportion of land covered by fences has grown by more than 20 percent since 2010. This expansion acts as a self-reinforcing process approaching a critical threshold, beyond which fence proliferation could accelerate even faster. If unchecked, the widespread erection of barriers threatens the collapse of the Greater Mara ecosystem, putting an end to wildlife movements, the great wildebeest migration, and the long-standing livelihoods of pastoralist communities.
The Greater Mara supports globally celebrated wildlife migrations alongside traditional Maasai pastoral culture. Rapid, uncontrolled fencing fractures these communal rangelands and endangers ecosystem stability. Understanding the acceleration and scale of barrier construction helps conservation planners and local leaders identify when habitats reach critical fragmentation thresholds, allowing for interventions before migration corridors and pastoral livelihoods are irreversibly lost.
The abstract describes an environmental monitoring approach using multispectral satellite imagery from 1985 to 2016 to map fence expansion. This remote sensing methodology could be applied by conservation organisations, land management authorities, and spatial data providers to track land-use changes. As presented in the abstract, the work represents applied analytical research rather than a commercial product, though the monitoring methods have direct operational utility for spatial planning tools.
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With land privatization and fencing of thousands of hectares of communal grazing areas, East Africa is struggling with one of the most radical cultural and environmental changes in its history. The 668,500-hectare Greater Mara is of crucial importance for the great migrations of large mammals and for Maasai pastoralist culture. However, the magnitude and pace of these fencing processes in this area are almost completely unknown. We provide new evidence that fencing is appropriating land in this area at an unprecedented and accelerating speed and scale. By means of a mapped series of multispectral satellite imagery (1985-2016), we found that in the conservancies with the most fences, areal cover of fenced areas has increased with >20% since 2010. This has resulted in a situation where fencing is rapidly increasing across the Greater Mara, threatening to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem in the near future. Our results suggest that fencing is currently instantiating itself as a new permanent self-reinforcing process and is about to reach a critical point after which it is likely to amplify at an even quicker pace, incompatible with the region's role in the great wildebeest migration, wildlife generally, as well as traditional Maasai pastoralism.
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DOI: 10.1038/srep41450
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