by Dennis Sizemore, Round River Co-Founder and Executive Director

The seemingly endless bounty of the Okavango Delta – which supports the majority of the world’s African elephants and the highest density of large predators – may be in jeopardy. Principle causal factors identified in this decline include expanding surrounding human pressures, the lack of connections to its historical migratory areas, and ever-increasing climatic changes.

For millennia, great herds of wildlife from the Zambezi, Linyanti, Chobe, Okavango Delta and Hwange, travelled to reach the nutrient rich grasses of the Makgadikgadi-Nxai Pans and the Central Kalahari. Our goal is to reestablish these longest of southern Africa’s large mammal migrations and to instill mechanisms to maintain this essential ecological process to sustain Botswana’s great wildlife populations.

Based on conservation science and traditional knowledge, Round River is conducting a conservation assessment to identify wildlife core and connectivity areas, community settlements, agricultural areas, water developments, livestock stocking levels and associated range management practices, tourism use, and assess key climate and human use drivers underlying future land use and landscape change and conditions.

To initiate this work, Round River with its partners Natural Selection Conservation Trust, Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, and the Okavango Research Institute conducted The Making Connections workshop, September 3-5, 2018, that brought together government agency representatives, scientists, community leaders and tourism operators to explore how connectivity for the Makgadikgadi/Nxai Pans could be restored in cooperation with local communities. A summary report of this workshop can be downloaded with this link.

Over this past summer Round River staff working with interns from Colby College also began the necessary mapping and ground truthing of related land uses in the Makgadikgadi/Nxai Pans. This work continues in February 2019 with staff, students, and community participates.