Traditional ranching practices enhance African savanna

Terra Daily via SPX: That human land use destroys natural ecosystems is an oft-cited assumption in conservation, but ecologists have discovered that instead, traditional ranching techniques in the African savanna enhance the local abundance of wild, native animals. These results offer a new perspective on the roles humans play in natural systems, and inform ongoing discussions about land management and biodiversity conservation.

For thousands of years, pastoralists in East African savannas have penned their cattle overnight in brush-walled corrals, called bomas. Bomas remain in use for about a year, resulting in tons of manure that fertilizes these small areas.

After abandonment, a lush carpet of grass springs up and these fertile "glades" - sometimes as large as a football field - remain visibly distinct from the surrounding savanna for over a century.

The team of ecologists, based at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya, found that trees close to the edges of glades grew faster and were generally larger than trees elsewhere in the savanna. They also found more insects and, the particular focus of the study, higher densities of a native species of gecko, Lygodactylus keniensis.

"The effect of these glades is clear," said Colin Donihue, the Yale University doctoral student who led the research, which is described in Ecology's April issue....

Savanna in Kenya, shot by Christopher T Cooper (CT Cooper), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license