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A08 Social ecology in livestock production systems

Block module (6 ECTS credits), Sustainable International Agriculture (SIA)
Summer semester 2018: 24.09.2018 – 12.10.2018 (Mo – Fr 13:30 pm – 17:00 pm)

Prof. Dr. B. Kaufmann
German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture (DITSL)

Registration latest until 31.08.2018. Module venue will be seminar room S1, Steinstr. 19, Witzenhausen.

Perceptions of rangelands vary widely, depending on the value we place on what we see, and what is worth knowing, sharing, and protecting. Furthermore, the discipline, scale, and methods of data collection and analysis change what is seen. To address the needs of pastoral communities, their values, needs, and requests must be integrated into the research process.

The overall approach of the project is to understand, recognize and value the current system of information gathering and sharing in pastoral production and rangeland use, and to identify effective ways of complementing it, rather than introducing a new system that may prove disconnected from the current practice.

InfoRange puts the potential users at the center of a research endeavor to increase their respective benefits from increasing resource use and production efficiency in rangeland-based livestock systems. Therefore, building on pastoralists’ current system of collecting and sharing relevant information for decision-making on resource use, InfoRange will employ a transdisciplinary approach to co-design ICT solutions with users and embed them in social innovation. 

InfoRange will combine user-generated information (e.g. similar to geotagging photos in google maps or live traffic updates) with remotely sensed data. State-of-the-art machine learning models will be developed to analyze the generated crowd data (e.g. time series), capture and understand phenomena such as differences in pasture use intensity as well as classify and recognize patterns in different scenarios. 

Including representatives of different governance bodies from the onset of the project permits the creation of outputs in formats suitable to enhance policy decisions. Leaving the ownership of the information collecting and sharing system with the local actors will result in the wide use of the newly introduced tools beyond the project end.

 

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Rangeland-based livestock production is a major land use system that contributes between 15 and 60 percent of the agricultural GDP in eastern and southern African countries. The growth of rangeland vegetation is highly variable in space and time, occurring in temporary patches. 

Knowledge of rangelands is crucial to their management and strategic use of resources. Local communities have developed strategies that are grounded in cultural practices, stories, ethics, and norms specific to their area. These strategies also require access to up-to-date information on heterogenous and seasonal resource availability.

However, site-specific information on the condition and intensity of use of rangeland resources is rarely available or accessible to herders in real-time. Consequently, incomplete or outdated information is often the basis on which pastoralists make decisions. 

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have enormous potential to provide easily accessible up-to-date information to increase efficiency based on spatial data generation, telemetry services, GPS navigation services, and mobile phone network services, reliably facilitated by an ever-growing system of private and public satellites. 

To successfully co-develop technology, InfoRange uses a transdisciplinary approach to create the ICT solutions together with users in a way that embeds them in social innovations. Through  an actor- and activity-oriented approach, we build on the knowledge of different involved actor groups to understand how their decision-making can be improved through ICT.

Linking digital solutions to the existing system offers opportunities for the community to improve their information gathering and sharing and make it more effective. In addition, digitization can facilitate communication between various stakeholders, such as veterinarians, authorities regulating water supply in pasture areas, or government agencies involved in other pastoral services.