Participatory mapping with pastoralists reveals their mental maps

Understanding users’ perception of natural resources is important in planning their sustainable use and management. Pastoralist communities manage their vast grazing territories and exploit resource variability through strategic mobility. To improve understanding of the local knowledge on which this is based and to document this knowledge in a way that can be communicated with “outsiders”, researchers applied a participatory mapping approach using satellite imagery, working with Borana pastoralists in southern Ethiopia. Their results were published in 2015 in the article Shaping the Herders’ “Mental Maps”: Participatory Mapping with Pastoralists’ to Understand Their Grazing Area Differentiation and Characterization in Environmental Management Vol. 56 (3).

The Borana herders saw their grazing areas as a set of distinctive grazing units with specific names and characteristics. They differentiated the areas according to landforms, vegetation types, prevalence of wildlife species, and man-made features. Their ranking of the seasonal grazing areas according to suitability for cattle grazing matched with satellite-based vegetation assessment of the abundance of desirable fodder varieties. Visualisation of the pastoralists’ grazing-area differentiation in digital maps shows the rangeland characteristics that pastoralists consider important in their grazing management and helps them communicate this knowledge to others.

Posted on 14 October 2020 in News, Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure