Land Degradation and Our Future

Many of us remember growing up with picture books to help us learn the alphabet.  My favorite books were the ones that matched letters with beautiful images of exciting animals.  Who could forget the mnemonics “G is for Giraffe,” “L is for Lion,” or “R is for Rhino?”  I fell in love with these animals at a young age and it continued into my adulthood, where I had the privilege to go and observe many of these species in the wild.  

In college, I wanted to pursue my passion for wildlife and science, so I chose to major in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.  There I learned that our planet’s environment is currently undergoing constant changes and, in many cases, threatening the number of healthy habitats for animals to live in.  I realized that unfortunately for future generations, some of the animals that I had so much fun learning about when I was a kid might only exist in books or pictures. 

For my senior thesis, I was able to do research in Kenya to study how the giraffe was impacted by changes in land quality.  Some of these changes are directly caused by the impact humans have on their surroundings, and one of the most problematic transformations has come from the decrease in land quality, also known as land degradation.  Kenya has some of the most interesting animals on the planet and, in some cases, its degraded land is directly adjacent to conservation areas; this means that the species living on the conservancies and the grazing population have a significant amount of overlap.  One example of this would be where I did my senior thesis: the Mpala Research Center.  Located in Laikipia County, Kenya, Mpala boasts the highest diversity of large mammals in the country and it is right next door to land that Kenyans commonly use for cattle grazing. 

As Lauren Mechak outlined in her recent blog post, “More Than Grassland,” utilization of grasslands is an extremely important part of human livelihood, however, grazing that is not managed in a sustainable way is one of the main threats to viable habitats for some of the earth’s most famous animals.  As the number of degraded land increases, the native fauna are forced to move around more frequently and in much broader ranges to try to find food.

While fascinating, the work I did there was more important to me than simply deepening my understanding of the crucial steps we must take to protect our planet; my research confirmed that giraffe lives are impacted by these negative changes in their wooded grassland home. I found that because degradation had impacted what land was available, giraffe had to change where they chose to eat, raise their babies, and interact with other giraffe.  These changes in behavior were different from what had been found in previous research. For example, some of the giraffe had no option but to choose to forage in the lower quality habitat and put their nutritional health at risk so that their offspring would be safe from predation.  This was a result of one of the things I did not expect to observe: other species which did not directly feed on the plant life in the area were also negatively affected by this land degradation.