An agent based-model of mobility of pastoralists was developed and applied to
the semi-arid rangeland region extending from southern Ethiopia to northern
Kenya. This model was used to investigate temporal adaptation of pastoralists to
the spatial heterogeneity of their environment. This dissertation describes the
development, structure, and corroboration process of the simulation model,
Pastoral Livestock Movement Model (PLMMO). PLMMO is a spatially explicit,
individual-based pastoralists-animal foraging and movement model. It
simultaneously simulates the foraging and movement behavior of individual
pastoralists and their livestock in a rangeland ecosystem. Pastoralists?? herd
mobility patterns and other measures of movement were compared to data from
field studies. Predictions of the model correspond to observed mobility patterns
across seasons. The distances moved were found to be significantly correlated
(r2 = 0.927 to 0.977, p<0.0001) to drought and non-drought climatic regimes.
The PLMMO model therefore proved to be a useful tool for simulating general
movement patterns of pastoralists relative to movement range sizes in the
pastoral rangelands of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.
We then used the PLMMO model to explore the impact of emerging changes in
rangeland use in the study area. The ways in which pastoralists?? mobility
patterns adapt to emerging challenges in the study area were explored by
simulating the following four scenarios: 1) climate change with concomitant reduction in forage yield, 2) climate change with concomitant improvement and
higher variability in forage yield, 3) increased livestock population densities and
4) improved access to water. The climate induced change scenario with
increased and more variable forage production resulted in the shortest distances
moved by pastoralists in comparison to all other scenarios. The total search
distances under this scenario were only 20% of normal season distances. The
improved water access scenario also returned a significant (p=0.017) drop in
distances moved. There was, however, no significant impact on either increase
in livestock numbers or reduction in available forage on mobility. We judged the
agent-based model PLMMO developed here as a robust system for emulating
pastoral mobility in the rangelands of eastern Africa and for exploring the
consequences of climate change and adaptive management scenarios.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/2631 |
| Date | 01 November 2005 |
| Creators | MacOpiyo, Laban Adero |
| Contributors | Stuth, Jerry W. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 2556378 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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