Understanding spatio-temporal resource preferences is paramount in the design of policies for sustainable development. Unfortunately, resource preferences are often unknown to policy-makers and have to be inferred from data. In this paper we consider the problem of inferring agents’ preferences from observed movement trajectories, and formulate it as an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) prob...

Marketed livestock offtake rates are commonly low among pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of east Africa. Many donors and policymakers have therefore emphasized the importance of interventions to directly address constraints that limit offtake so as to stimulate greater use of markets as a means both to increase incomes and wealth and to improve pastoralists’ capacity to manage regul...

The African lion Panthera leo, spotted hyena Crocuta crocuta and leopard Panthera pardus are all killed in retaliation for livestock predation, but each species suffers differently from these impacts due to differences in predatory behavior and cultural attitudes of pastoralists. Using detailed data on livestock predation in the Maasai steppe landscape in Northern Tanzania, I investigated how p...

This study examines the ways in which the adaptive capacity of households to climatic events varies within communities and is mediated by institutional and landscape changes. We present qualitative and quantitative data from two Maasai communities differentially exposed to the devastating drought of 2009 in Northern Tanzania. We show how rangeland fragmentation combined with the decoupling of i...

This paper describes the findings of ethnobotanical research conducted in Tibetan community of agro-pastoralists in Dolpo, northwest Nepal. We assessed vernacular classification and plant nomenclature system with a particular focus on medicinal plants. We aimed to encompass the interpretation of semantic categories, as well as observing directly how people relate to plants in all material and s...

Lack of information on the production and commercialization status improved Panicum grass is one major livestock impediments in South Omo. The a perennial species used throughout tropics for feeding. Therefore, present study was conducted to understand seed hay economic visibility cultivation. face-to-face interviews were with producers. quantitative data, such as amount bales produced, qualita...