Rotational grazing with cattle-free zones supports the coexistence of cattle and wild herbivores in African rangelands

African wildlife populations are declining at an alarming rate. To stop further population declines and restore ecosystems, more areas for wildlife are needed. Community-based conservation with wildlife-livestock coexistence in the vast rangelands of Africa presents a major opportunity. However, the efficacy of wildlife conservation in mixed land-use areas remains an outstanding question. To assess the ecological outcomes of land-sharing between regulated livestock herds and wildlife populations in African savannas, we test how rotational cattle grazing affects spatiotemporal dynamics of 15 large herbivore species in the Maasai Mara, Kenya.
First, we tested how wild herbivore distributions across the Greater Mara Ecosystem (the Mara, ~2,600 km2) are related to cattle density and environmental variables using 584,561 observations of wild herbivores (ecosystem scale). In a second analysis, we tested how rotational cattle grazing affects wild herbivore distributions in a 300 km2 subsection..., ,