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  1. I enjoyed your presentation very much as I am also interested in pastoral mobility and the governance of common-pool resources. I have a few comments and questions.

    First, your research shows that extensive pastoral mobility is better for livestock because they spend less time traveling and more time grazing and that it is better for pastures because the grazing pressure is distributed over a wider area. However, you describe mobility as a response to environmental stress, rather than as a response to environmental opportunity. The question is whether herds are moving away from areas with lower NDVI values and/or moving to areas with higher NDVI values? Are pastoralists moving away or moving too? Framing matters.

    Second, I would love learn more about the perceived boundaries that you described in the introduction. Have you written about this in your publications?

    Finally, I like the idea of planning for resource sharing between communities in order to support extensive pastoralism. I would love to learn more about that too.

    1. Hi Mark: Thanks for your interest and ideas on possible future research topics.
      1) I should clarify that camp relocation is a response to environmental stress on rangelands close to base camp locations. Yes, framing matters, and we can also say that pastoralists relocate to seasonal grazing sites to pursue better environmental opportunities there. While NDVI is generally used as an indicator grazing value on rangelands, the highly encroached rangelands by different woody species makes it tricky to use NDVI. Open grassland or savanna can have lower NDVI but higher grazing value than encroached bushes.
      2) Other than the herding decision making paper in which I used the perceived boundaries as a predictor variable, I haven’t written one specifically about this topic. Certainly something to do in the future.
      3) From our GPS tracking data, we do see one household relocate to the outskirts of a neighboring community to access their well during drought. I will further explore such evidence of resource sharing.

      1. Regarding perceived cf. constructed/materialised boundaries, this is a super interesting issue. Check out Barry Smith’s work on fiat and bona fide boundaries (e.g. Phil and Phen Research 2000); I have also published on a deep time approach to this matter in Current Anth and J of Cog and Cult (both from 2014).

  2. The use of GPS is interesting in understanding herding patterns. What was the response by the herders when you were presenting the findings to them?

    1. Thanks for your comment. We translated those maps into the local language to make them relevant. Different people had different different responses. Some young herders who went to school were better at interpreting those maps. Older herders need more explanation to understand. Our hope is that the young herders can help other community members for interpretation, and facilitate discussion on rangeland management.

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