University of Groningen
Water and wildlife in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem Kihwele, Emilian
DOI:
10.33612/diss.164324240
IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below.
Document Version
Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record
Publication date: 2021
Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database
Citation for published version (APA):
Kihwele, E. (2021). Water and wildlife in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.164324240
Copyright
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).
Take-down policy
If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum.
1. Intense livestock grazing changes the condition of watersheds through its effects on grass biomass and water infiltration capacity, ultimately resulting into severe erosion and both short-lived flash floods and prolonged low/zero flow periods that diminish surface water availability for wildlife use (this thesis).
2. Fire has a much smaller impact and wildlife grazing even less that diminishes surface water availability for wildlife use especially in the dry season (this thesis).
3. The recent evidences on a wide range of water requirements among large mammalian herbivores provides an important
understanding that protected area managers need to consider when addressing water provision through artificial water sources across the landscape (this thesis).
4. Heteregeneity in surface water availability across the landscape is critically important for enhancing species diversity and coexistence of diverse herbivore community assemblages and thus good for ecosystem proccesses and functioning.
5. Minimum dry season dung moisture content, an ease to measure (functional trait) is an index for species’s water dependence among savanna ungulates (this thesis).
6. The mean distance to water distribution of browsers depends on species-specific water requirements.
7. Water requirements explain spatial niche partioning of grazing herbivores in addition to body size (this thesis).
8. Wildlife ecosystems are made-up of seasonally used
compartments that defines and explain the seasonal movement of large migratory ungulates (Wolanski et at 2002).