Organization: African Conservation Fund (ACF)

Project Location: Kenya

Web address:  www.africanconservationfund.org

Title of Grant: “Modeling the Dynamics of African Savannas for Scientifically Based Conservation Strategies”

Grant Amount:  $ 200,000 over 2 years

Principal Investigator: David Western

Organization Background: 

The African Conservation Fund (ACF) was founded in 2003 by a small group of East Africans, Britons and Americans who have long commitments to the conservation of East Africa’s wildlife and cultures.  In late 2005 ACF hired its first executive director and is now in full program development mode.

Many of the projects the organization supports are carried out by a partner entity, such as the 12-year-old Nairobi-based African Conservation Centre, with whom ACF shares board membership.

This partnership gives the organization an important on-the-ground connection to select and work with projects in East Africa, while the board and staff work in the West to create economic, training, and communications resources for these projects.

Grant Description:

Based on rich data from 40-year field study of the Amboseli ecosystem, southern Kenya, and use of a mathematical model of large herbivore dynamics, this project will develop a generalized biodiversity information platform with four aims in mind. First, the platform will be designed to incorporate data from field studies and remote imagery with the aim of accessing and managing heterogeneous data sets using a Relational Database package. Second, once a prototype relational database has been created and tested against the Amboseli data, it will be adapted for community conservation initiatives on a local scale and biodiversity mapping and planning on a national and regional scale. Third, the platform will facilitate the integration and sharing of extensive data scattered among institutions and make them available to conservation researchers, planners and managers. Fourth, training workshops will conducted through the Society for Conservation GIS (Kenya) to improve community-level and technical capacity in the use of bioinformatics in conservation planning.

The Problem:
In recent years the pressures on Africa’s wildlife has intensified due to rising human population, settlements, farming, conflict between people and wild animals and shift in climate patterns. As an example, in Kenya long term patterns show that wildlife numbers have been consistently dropping. This contrasts with the stable to growing wildlife populations in community conservation initiatives established over the last two decades. ACF hopes to address the following two problems: 1) What factors are driving the varying fates of wildlife numbers in savanna ecosystems 2) What tools are needed to develop scientifically based conservation strategies to keep savanna ecosystem functionally intact.

The Solution:

The goal of the project is to provide decision support tools that will help wildlife agencies and community-based associations to manage ungulate populations profitably and sustainably and to maintain the productivity and integrity of savanna ecosystems in the face of pending privatization and land fragmentation.

Global Impact:
The decision making platform will have wide applicability and be adopted by wildlife conservators who manage savanna ecosystems, national parks and reserves. ACF/ACC’s direct link between research, planning and management in both national parks such as Amboseli and Maasai Mara and communities across southern Kenya ensures that the models and methodologies will be interactive and directly applicable to ongoing conservation activities. Quantitative models to describe spatiotemporal dynamics of population change, based on eco-informatics techniques, will be developed using free public statistical software and will be made available to the public. A training course on the modeling is planned at the University of Nairobi.