Participatory mapping, database building, and monitoring of rangeland resources (Kenia)

Participatory mapping and monitoring of vegetation types and other natural resources in the rangelands. This involves convening stakeholder groups, reviewing conditions of rangeland, water and other resources under changing climatic conditions.

Participatory digital mapping using satellite imagery and digital earth and other open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a practical tool that can bridge knowledge and communication gaps between pastoral communities and county government planners. It offers an effective ‘tool’ for participatory planning and decision-making in support of climate change adaptation efforts in the drylands of Kenya.The use of participatory mapping is not new in seeking to capture communities’ understanding and use of natural resources. These maps are typically drawn on the ground using stones, sticks and other locally available materials to depict key features such as schools, water points, and forest areas, etc. However the process used in Isiolo County combines digital mapping with community-drawn perception maps. This offers a number of extra benefits. While fully capturing the wealth of local knowledge, they contain an in-built coordinate system which corresponds to a global reference grid, enabling their linkage to maps used in formal systems. Furthermore, the coordinate system provides a geographically precise basis from which to discuss natural resource management, making outputs of participatory mapping more universally useable. These benefits, however, need to be carefully balanced to avoid the risk that through this process, pastoral resources – which are highly dynamic - are ‘frozen’ in time and space. Mapping processThe participatory mapping process has adopted GIS workflows within community workshops, enabling the creation of integrated, consistent and standardized geospatial information. The process follows seven steps:Step 1: Community level meetings to develop perception maps drawn on the ground and/or on paper. The product is a community perception map of those resources that are important for their livelihood systems. This map should be created in a community setting to enable the participation of a large group. Several maps may be produced by smaller sub-groups (women, the youth, elders etc) and then amalgamated. The final map is then copied onto paper. Step 2. Digital mapping is introduced. This step takes place in a workshop setting with a smaller group of key informants chosen by the community - as well as county government planners and technical staff. The presence of the latter is critical to the process of ‘legitimizing’ community knowledge. Following a quick explanation of satellite imagery, Google Earth is projected onto a wall alongside the perception maps developed under step 1. The use of Google Earth is only for orientation, and to enable participants to navigate the imagery and to cross-reference their paper-mapped key resources against the satellite imagery. Features that participants feel are important (e.g. water points, wet and dry season grazing areas, drought reserves, wildlife routes) are then captured digitally using open source applications: Quantum GIS (QGIS) and JOSM, the Open Street Map editing platform.This produces the coordinates that pinpoint the locations of natural resources in a manner that can be independently and objectively verified. The highly interactive process of geo-referencing local knowledge to a coordinate reference system allows resource maps to be produced to any scale, and in real-time, with the community. Step 3. Qualitative and quantitative attributes describing the key resources are collected. As participants add features to the map, they also describe their specified characteristics or attributes. Attribution data includes a fuller description of the physical characteristics of the resource (e.g. soil type, waterquantity and quality, pasture species) as well as issues concerning their management (e.g. under customary or modern management, land tenure status, negotiated or paid access, area of conflict). Updating this data on a regular basis adds temporal and trend data to the spatial database. This underlines the need to structure data systems well to manage time-based data and to record updates.Steps 4-6: Data verification cycles are integrated into the mapping process in order to capture community feedback and verify the records in the geospatial data and their attribute values against the specification. The mapping includes a series of validation, cross-checking and verification cycles, run with the community - and in a few instances on-the-ground verification termed ‘groundtruthing’. Step 7: Field validation. Field validation is carried out where the verification stages highlight gaps in information. Verification consists of targeted field visits to take GPS markers, or holding meetings with the local community to clarify particular issues.