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9th International Wildlife Ranching Symposium

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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/180913
The 9th International Wildlife Ranching Symposium, "Wildlife: The Key to Prosperity for Rural Communities," was held September 12-16, 2016 at Hotel Safari and the Safari Court in Windhoek, Namibia to "tell the world that private and communal conservation is important, it can fill fragmented gaps, and we need to include everyone in the quest for a planet that supports wild animals, wildness, and appreciation of wild things." These digital collections include materials from the 9th International Wildlife Ranching Symposium as well as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 2nd African Buffalo Symposium.

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Browsing 9th International Wildlife Ranching Symposium by Author "Brooks, C., author"

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    Livestock or wildlife in western Ngamiland, Botswana: a case of who dares wins
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016-09) Perkins, J. S., author; Brooks, C., author; Bourquin, S., author; Bradley, J., author; International Wildlife Ranching Symposium, publisher
    Land use planning in North-western Botswana has reached a critical juncture. Key wildlife movements from the Okavango Delta System to the drier Kalahari have almost been cut-off by linear development, settlement expansion and dryland farming, along the margins of the Okavango Panhandle and Okavango Delta. Botswana's burgeoning elephant population is expanding outwards to an unprecedented degree, damaging fences and infrastructure and causing high levels of Human Elephant Conflict. Saline groundwater and an abundance of Dichapetalum cymosum has limited livestock expansion and currently vast areas of effectively ‘empty savannah' burn every year. Mobility is the key for the persistence of all the key wild ungulate populations and when this was lost in the Kalahari System thirty five years ago more than a half million blue wildebeest and red hartebeest perished never to recover. Fenced game and livestock ranches offer no substitute to an open system in which large ungulates are able to move between the Zambezian and Kalahari floristic domains. Game ranched populations cannot meaningfully contribute to the restocking of the free ranging populations as they become water dependent and behaviourally unable to survive in the harsh Kalahari environment. A hierarchy of options exist from visionary connectivity of north-western Botswana to the broader KAZA-TFCA, to the sectoral prioritization of a heavily subsidised beef sector. It would be a tragedy if the resolution of this natural resource management conflict followed that of the Kalahari System last century, where who dared won.