New land tenure fences are still cropping up in the Greater Mara

Abstract

Expanding and intensifying anthropogenic land use is one of the greatest drivers of changes of biodiversity loss and political inequality worldwide. In the Greater Mara, Kenya, a trend of private land enclosure is currently happening, led by smallholders wishing to protect and uphold their land titles. Here we expand on previous work by Løvschal et al. quantifying the rapid, large-scale development of fencing infrastructure that began in 1985 but has increased by 170% from 2010 onwards. We provide fine-scale analysis of the spatial and temporal trends in fencing using high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. The formally unprotected regions have distinctly more fences than the rest of the Mara, one experiencing a 740% increase in fenced land in four years. Conservancies have an effect in stemming fencing but fences crop up within and along conservancy boundaries. We estimate the actual geographical coverage of the fences in the Mara to be 130,277 ha (19% of the total region) using an error margin of 8%, derived by calibrating our satellite mapping with ground-truth data. The study suggests the need for revising community-based eco-conservation efforts and pursuing a richer understanding of the socio-political and historical dynamics underlying this phenomenon.

Land use drives differential resource selection by African elephants in the Greater Mara Ecosystem, Kenya

“…Elephants have large home-ranges and requirements for vegetative and water resources which puts them at risk from the expanding human-footprint across most of their continental range [ 36 ]. The Greater Mara Ecosystem is an area undergoing rapid human-footprint expansion including fencing [ 55 , 75 , 76 ], agricultural expansion and industrialization [ 77 ], livestock increase [ 50 ], deforestation [ 78 ], accelerated human population growth [ 50 , 79 ], and wildlife declines [ 50 ]. It is also still considered to be a globally premiere wildlife and biodiversity hotspot and represents important economic revenue for Narok County and Kenya as a whole [ 80 ].…”

“…Recent estimates put the elephant population in the Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem at 7535 individuals with 2595 within the GME [ 54 ]. Elephants in the GME remain threatened by human elephant conflict, illegal hunting for ivory, expansion of agriculture, and a surge of fencing, road development, and settlements in unprotected corridors and dispersal areas [ 50 , 55 , 56 ]. Given the rapid changes occurring across the landscape in relation to increasing human pressures, identifying and characterizing high value features on the landscape for elephants is important for informing the ecosystem management process currently underway.…”

Monitoring spatiotemporal dynamics of large herbivores across an African rangeland using hierarchical multi‐species distance sampling

“…Extreme dry periods can also explain short-term variations in species densities as abiotic factors are one of the most prevalent forces in shaping forage productivity and large herbivore abundance in Kenyan savannas (Ellis & Swift, 1988;Ogutu et al, 2007;Ogutu & Owen-Smith, 2005). The small negative effect of time on some species number of groups, such as wildebeest and Thomson's gazelles, despite the constant trend in NDVI across the conservancy could be indicative of the negative effect that increasing density of fences around the boundary of the conservancy (Løvschal et al, 2017(Løvschal et al, , 2022 can have on the movement of these species (Stabach et al, 2022), with potential negative effects on populations.…”

Evaluating the determinants of participation in conservancy land leases and its impacts on household wealth in the Maasai Mara, Kenya: Equity and gender implications

“…However, this becomes difficult as mounting pressure is exerted by livestock owned by conservancy member households on pasture and water on land outside conservancies, and as a result is partly driving the dramatic proliferation of fences (Løvschal et al, 2017(Løvschal et al, , 2022 around livestock pasture and watering points in the Mara.…”