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“Hi, my name is Rob Lilieholm. I'm an associate professor in the School of Forest Resources
here at the University of Maine, and what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about
some of the research we're doing in east Africa and Kenya, specifically,
looking at alternative futures modeling in some wildlife areas.
“We focus on Kenya because, first of all, it has some of the most spectacular wildlife
anywhere in the world. Globally, it shows up as one of the most diverse and important
ecologically areas, especially for savanna land animals. And altogether,
these wildlife are not only an important part of global biodiversity but also a very important
economic driver for Kenyans.
“Our particular focal area is in the southern part of Kenya, and we're really primarily
looking at wildebeests. Wildebeests are particularly important because of their long migration,
one of the largest land migrations of any land mammal, and they
also form a key part of the food chain.
“If we focus on some of the more important wildlife refuges within Kenya, we see a number
of growing pressures on these areas. First of all, we see urbanization, and here's a
picture of downtown Nairobi. You can see it's in many ways a modern urban
city. We also see — and this is what fuels a lot of that growth — a lot of mining.
Also, what we're seeing is a lot of deforestation, fencing and increased agricultural use of
the land.
“And then also, across the entire region of southern Kenya and into Tanzania, we're
seeing changes in climate that are making the droughts and the rainy seasons a little
less predictable. We've had some very severe droughts in recent years that have
led to tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths of different types of wildlife.
“Our project objective is to try to figure out how future development and climate change
is going to affect the sustainability of wildlife populations and their migration patterns.
We have three primary focus areas: the first is Nairobi National
Park, the second is the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and the third is Amboseli National
Park.
“You can see in this map of Kenya, we're looking at the southern part of the country.
Like most other national parks in this region of Africa, Nairobi National Park was set up
to protect dry-season habitat; these are permanent water sources. The
idea was that during the dry season animals could congregate in these national parks as
a sanctuary, and then when the rains came they could move out of the park.
“What's happened in recent years is that increased urbanization and conversion to agricultural
uses has limited the ability of the animals to get in and out of the park. This map shows
Nairobi National Park, and to the north you can see the capital
city of Nairobi. The narrow arrows leading in and out of the park show historic wildebeest
migration routes that are no longer in effect because of urbanization and development. The
thicker lines to the south show existing wildebeest migration
patterns.
“The next slide shows some of the high-density — these are actually some of the urban slums
that are located just a few kilometers north of the national park. This happens to be the
Kibera slum. In 2005, there were two cement factories in this
region. Today, there are five, and they're busy fueling basically the growth of the city
and outlying areas.
“This next slide shows some of the mining along the riparian corridor, and this is just
on the south boundary of the park. There are laws in place to protect those riparian corridors
— this shows a hundred-meter buffer around the stream — but what's
happening is the mining is going right up against the edge of that buffer. This creates
almost like a Roman aqueduct, where we've got a raised stream bed with the areas all
around it mined.
“Another threat to the park is increased fencing. Through time, as the landscape becomes
more fragmented, more and more people are coming in, buying small plots and fencing
the plots, sometimes putting in agriculture, sometimes not. All of these
fences decrease the permeability, or the ability of the animals to move in and out, of Nairobi
National Park. There are also some large homes that are going in along the southern edge
of the national park.
“And then, finally, this is kind of a shantytown that's sprang up on the south part of the
national park. You can see, wherever you get roads and power lines, pretty quickly you'll
begin to see the beginning of a new settlement.
“If we move now to the Maasai Mara National Reserve, there we don't see the overall development
pressures that we see up around Nairobi, but we do see some deforestation going on, especially
in the Mau River, which is critical as a water supply for
the Mara River. We see increased fencing going on that, once again, is decreasing the ability
of animals to move through that landscape and get to that dry-season habitat.
“And then we're also seeing increased pressure for new ecotourism lodges, and more and more
visitors. A lot of the times these lodges will go in right on the boundaries of the
national park, so while we're not seeing the types of development that we
see up in Nairobi, we are seeing a more constricted — and kind of de facto — chain around
the national park, and sometimes these fences can be 12, 15 feet tall and electric to keep
wildlife — whether it's predators or elephants — out of resort areas
and swimming pools as well.
“Shifting our attention now to Amboseli National Park, now we're in that southeastern
area of our southern Kenyan study area, and here we see, once again, ecotourism pressures
— new lodges and increased visitation. Then we're also seeing
agricultural development, especially along the eastern edge of the national park. Now,
Amboseli sits at the base of Kilimanjaro, and it supports a lot of swamps and wildlife
that rely on those swampy areas. Some of those areas outside the park are
being readily converted for agricultural production.
“So getting back to the overall objective of our study, we're trying to use alternative
futures modeling as a way to understand the past and then envision what the future might
look like. We have two main components to the project. The first is
modeling wildebeest migration behavior, and we're doing that using hourly GPS tracking
from radio collars that are on about close to 40 wildebeest, and then those data are
being uploaded via satellite and used to create agent-based models that
predict individual wildebeest behavior.
“The second part, then, is to create future landscapes based on past and current development
patterns, and then try and understand how these new landscapes and wildebeest behavior
interact through time, and see what that implies for the viability of
wildebeest and other wildlife to be able to survive under changing human and climate conditions.”