PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #38: Landscape Ecology.
Thursday, August 9, 2001. Presentation from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM. Exhibition Hall

Ecological effects upon Maasai pastoral settlement patterns and cattle migration distances.

Lynn, Stacy¹, Ellis, James¹, Boone, Randall¹, ¹

ABSTRACT- Diverse vegetation classes from semi-arid grassland to moist forest are distributed among three major ecological zones in northern Tanzania. These lowland, midland and highland ecozones form important land-use regions for Maasai pastoralists, whose household settlement patterns fall along a mobility gradient from sedentary to very mobile. To date very little household-level research has been done to investigate the relationship between ecology and local Maasai land use. Yet detailed information on land use could prove very useful to conservation policymakers and managers in their goal to balance the needs of resident peoples and wildlife. We hypothesize that settlement patterns are a function of household location within the three ecozones, an indication that land use varies according to local ecological conditions. These variations are believed to occur both seasonally and spatially. Interview data from 36 households provided 12 continuous months of cattle movement data. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was built to depict the geographic locations of households, watering sites, and grazing sites, allowing an innovative spatial analysis of monthly herd movements. Statistical analyses indicate that a combination of settlement pattern, ecozone, and location in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area or Loliondo Game Controlled Area is an important determinant of distance traveled. The data indicate that Maasai land use tactics vary both seasonally and across ecozones to take best advantage of available resources in this temporally and spatially variable environment.

KEY WORDS: land-use, pastoralist, cattle, gis