Scalable ecosystem monitoring in Kenya
Enhancing soil health and human-wildlife coexistence through data-driven evidence
People:
Partners:
University of Nairobi, Center for Ecosystem Restoration (Limuru), and Mpala Research Center (Laikipia)
Media links:
Website - Scalable ecosystem monitoring in Kenya initiative
Technical approaches:
Machine learning; Environmental monitoring; Social science
Challenge areas:
Agriculture & food systems; Biodiversity, ecosystems & nature; Land use, management & change
African ecosystems are central to the continent’s environmental health, economic stability, and human wellbeing, supporting biodiversity, agriculture, clean water, clean energy, and tourism. However, they face growing pressures from climate change, land degradation, and human expansion, leading to challenges such as declining agricultural productivity and increased human–wildlife conflict.
Addressing these interconnected issues requires improving food production on limited land while restoring ecosystems and protecting biodiversity, all within the broader context of resilience to ecological crises.
Understanding and managing complex ecosystems can only advance through data-driven evidence of their state, evolution, and sustainable interventions, and thereby inform decision-making. Scaling up data acquisition across large, complex landscapes is the key bottleneck.
However, ecosystem monitoring is extremely difficult: any comprehensive understanding of interactions between diverse agents, and how they change across spatial and temporal scales, across regions and over time, requires scalable, non-invasive, information-dense, well-understood data, ideally in real-time. To meet some of the most urgent and demanding challenges unfolding across Africa and elsewhere, this is the only viable path forward.
This project will enable in-field physics applied to two key challenges in Africa: food provision and wildlife conflict, both intrinsically embedded in the climate crisis, while offering scalable climate solutions, improving community resilience and local stakeholder empowerment.
Find out more about scalable ecosystem monitoring in Kenya
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