A Web-Based Decision Support Tool For Monitoring Kenya's Rangelands

The Kenyan ASALs (Arid and Semi-Arid Lands) through livestock production, contribute to over 12% of the 40% Agricultural GDP with further contribution through the tourism sector. They cover over 70% of the country and are home to both wildlife and pastoral communities. In order to build resilience of the rangelands due to dependence on rainfed production, provision of timely and actionable information for decision makers is very important.

The need to alleviate this problem led to the design of a service that will enable timely access to information for decision makers through development of a centralized platform where aggregation and synthesis of data can be carried out and provide maps that can inform decision makers at different scales. Indicators for monitoring are availed through derivation of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) at decadal, monthly and seasonal time steps and included current values, anomalies, and deviations from the long-term mean. Data ingestion and processing is automated with the final datasets being aggregated in a web system. For meaningful interpretation ancillary datasets such as invasive species, surface water, rivers, roads, administrative and management unit boundaries (paddocks, conservancies) are included. The system is able to automatically generate maps at a user defined boundary with layers based on the user's selection, that provide insights on the land's productivity and degradation over both spatial and temporal scale.

The tool has been applied to provide assessments that answer different management questions, including assessing trends; identifying where there is need to change management strategies to promote recovery; identifying hotspots where vegetation productivity decline has persisted or monitor success of rehabilitation efforts; complementing indigenous knowledge for better planning and management; and providing a spatial view of the variations in the productivity in the management unit landscape.