From Degradation to Restoration: How ArcGIS Transformed Grasslands in Tanzania
Walking through the tall grasses, it’s clear how much Tanzania’s rangelands have changed over time. Historically, this landscape was teeming with wildlife – zebra, giraffe, buffalo, and the predators that follow them. But when our team first visited this region of northern Tanzania in 2017, wildlife was sparse. Cattle grazed in degraded rangelands, led by young Maasai herders in search of richer pastures. Unpalatable and invasive shrubs littered the landscape, proliferating each year and outcompeting the native grasses critical for both wildlife and livestock. A severe drought, one of many signs that climate change is already affecting this region, exacerbated the challenges faced by the Maasai pastoralists in Ngoley village.
Now, seven years and an El Niño later, I drive past herds of cattle and goats grazing alongside zebra and wildebeest, accompanied by Gidabanja Melisha, one of the local community rangeland monitors. We had just finished the monthly monitoring of Mkuyu pasture and were on our way back to Ngoley village to send the most recent rangeland quality metrics to the ArcOnline database. When we arrived at the village’s Conservation Technology Center (CTC), a few men were watching football on a large screen; members of Ngoley’s village grazing committee often gather here to take advantage of the screens and network before reviewing that month’s rangeland data. After the usual pleasantries, we got to work.
In 2017, the village of Ngoley in Babati District, Tanzania, began participating in African People & Wildlife’s (APW) Sustainable Rangelands Initiative. The initial phases followed APW’s ACTIVE approach to community engagement. We spent months learning about the existing natural resource governance structures in the village, identifying community champions, discussing environmental and social challenges most relevant to the people living in the area, and finding shared goals that would benefit both people and wildlife. Key among these goals was improving the grasslands on which wildlife and livestock depend. We conducted a participatory site assessment together with the village’s existing grazing committee, mapping key pastures and collecting baseline data on grass height and color, percentage of basal vegetation versus bare ground, and frequency of invasive or problematic species.
The second phase involved training two Community Rangeland Monitors – Maasai pastoralists with extensive experience in these rangelands – on using mobile data collection technology. Traditionally, Maasai pastoralists have used marks on their legs to represent grass height and geographic landmarks to track bush encroachment and vegetation cover changes. Blending tradition with innovation, we co-designed a Survey123 form incorporating these metrics alongside scientific methods for measuring grassland health. Each month, the Rangeland Monitors collect data from 15 plots across the village’s critical pastures.
Since 2019, the APW team has streamlined a workflow that submits data from Survey123 to a feature layer for monthly review and cleaning. The data appear in real time in a Dashboard, Ngoley Rangeland Dashboard which can be filtered by plot so the village grazing committee can compare current pasture status to past months and years.
Mkuyu pasture has always been of particular interest to the committee, especially during bi-monthly feedback meetings to review data and decide on grazing allocations. Located about halfway between Lake Burunge and Lake Manyara, and not far from a main road, Mkuyu is especially vulnerable to invasive species spread. For three years, the committee watched a particularly aggressive shrub, Sphaeranthus (Orkipire lekima in Maa), proliferate across the pasture. Represented as a pink line in the serial chart below, this drought-resistant species maintained a steady frequency from 2021 to 2023 while native grasses struggled. Then, in late 2023, when heavy El Niño rains began in northern Tanzania, the shrub dominated the landscape, covering 85% of Mkuyu pasture.
This rapid spread of an invasive species triggered a restoration intervention. Ngoley’s village grazing committee used the dashboard as evidence to apply for Sustainable Rangelands Initiative funding to implement an invasive species control project. In September 2023, the village recruited 350 people for rangeland restoration, ultimately uprooting Sphaeranthus from over 1,500 acres of grassland. The team has kept a close eye on the treated pastures since this intervention, checking the dashboard monthly for signs of resurgence.
Over a year later, native grasses have rebounded in Ngoley. The village grazing committee speaks enthusiastically about the long rains that have begun and the rising grass height in Block 3 pasture, where the dashboard now shows the highest quality metrics since 2021.
We sort to the next plot: Mkuyu. Gidabanja Melisha studies the dashboard for a moment, then smirks at a small purple dot for this month in the invasive species serial chart, indicating Tribulus terrestris. This species consistently appears at the end of the short rains but poses no long-term threat. He compares the chart to side-by-side photos of the plot, including one we took an hour earlier showing tall grasses and a few patches of T. terrestris. “Every year,” he laughs.
What once seemed like an overwhelming challenge – monitoring rangeland health across vast landscapes – has become a structured, data-driven process thanks to traditional monitoring practices paired with Esri technology. Using tools like Survey123 and ArcGIS Dashboards, communities like Ngoley can now track changes, respond to threats in real time, and make informed decisions that benefit both people and wildlife.
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Methusela Lameck Magobeko is the Geospatial Data and Conservation Technology Officer at African People & Wildlife. A Geoinformatics graduate from the University of Dodoma, he has over three years of experience in wildlife conservation, specializing in GIS applications for environmental management.
African People & Wildlife (APW) works hand in hand with communities and other partners to create a healthier and more sustainable world—protecting wildlife, investing in people, and restoring balance to Africa’s vital ecosystems through effective conservation action, applied science, and collective impact. APW’s inclusive and holistic approach to conservation drives effective, measurable, and lasting outcomes for people and nature. Founded in 2005, APW is a recognized leader in the field of community-driven conservation.