Intensive rainfall, livestock, and land use processes can damage the physical soil and water conservation structures such as soil bunds, stone bunds, fanya juus, trenches, and micro-basins.
We evaluated the model by simulating changes in the plant communities under historical (1974 2000) temperature, rainfall, livestock grazing rotation, and brush control regimes, and comparing simulation results to field data on herbaceous biomass and brush canopy cover collected on the WWR over the same period.
With regard to the perceived drivers of forage availability, we have shown that besides rainfall, livestock-related production factors (herd size, number of kraals), environmental conditions (soils), institutional factors (rules and regulations, movement restrictions) and socio-demographic factors such as length of residence at a location are perceived to influence forage availability.
The Orma recognize three types of pasture conditions resulting from different types of rainfall and livestock grazing.
Due to decreasing grazing land and high rainfall variability, livestock feed mostly on less palatable grasses available in pastures and after-harvest crop residues, which had continued to increase in Burkina Faso (Barbier et al. 2009; Zampaligré et al. 2013).
The current study investigates the impact of rainfall variability on livestock population dynamics and communities' adaptation practices.
Specifically, the objectives of this study are to (i) characterize drought severity, (ii) determine association between rainfall variability and livestock population dynamics and (iii) determine drought adaptation strategies in Kgalagadi South district, Botswana.
The risks expose the ASALs in the region to the challenge of exponential costs occasioned by unreliable, highly variable, and scarce rainfall for their livestock and crop production (Tol et al. 1998; Bhatt et al. 2006; Cooper et al. 2012).
Rainfall has dictated livestock numbers and migratory patterns over the past several decades so this could in turn limit the contact that cattle may have with an environment where B. anthracis exist in the soil.
We applied panel data regression techniques and used the variables per capita crop arability, livestock, rainfall (both linear and quadratic) and temperature in the model to estimate the effect of climate variability on child wasting, underweight and stunting.
Salmonella has been reported to persist in the environment for several months to more than a year (14, 33 – 35), and Salmonella in irrigation ponds could come from residential or industrial water, runoff water, rainfall, soil, crops, livestock, wildlife, or husbandry activities (35).
