Trend-cycles of vegetation dynamics as a tool for land degradation assessment and monitoring Easdale, M. H.

Transhumant pastoralism is mobile livelihood strategy in which families and their herds move seasonally from lowlands, where they settle during the winter, towards the highlands, located in mountainous areas, during the summer. We propose a framework, rooted in a socio-environmental coevolutionary perspective, for the transhumant annual cycle as comprised by the winter-phase, the summer-phase, and movement transitions between them. The aim was to assess the level of synchrony between ecological phases and social phases and the benefit of moving between pasturelands in selected study cases from Patagonia, Argentina. Ecological phases were addressed by the difference between vegetation productivity of winter- and summer-lands, with Fourier transform applied to data series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Social phases were estimated by the proportion of annual time spent by pastoralists and their herds in each site and during transitions, respectively, obtained from interviews. The framework was sensitive to capturing differences across study cases. There was an observed tendency towards more synchronisation in the cases with closer distances and asynchrony in the cases with longer distances and longer movement transitions between pasturelands. Results are encouraging as a step towards the development of a monitoring system of both transhumant pastoralism activity and environmental changes.

Those involved in sustainability debates on developmental pathways concur in the synergistic potential of integrating traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western scientific approaches. Transhumant pastoralism is a livelihood strategy adapted to spatiotemporal environmental variability in many mountainous and arid regions worldwide. This form of livelihood is based on a mobile logic that is increasingly threatened by novel lifestyles promoted from a Western mind‐set and by climate change. The aim of this article is to identify and characterize the different perspectives of environmental and social issues in a pastoral region and their association with labor collaboration among extension agents, framed in an institutional action. We tackled the inquiry about viewpoints with Q methodology and related it to regional problems, alternative solutions, and future development pathways for transhumant pastoralism and landscape management in northwest Patagonia. We identified six perspectives and characterized them with their topological position in the social network. Mediating positions registered the highest network centrality of labor collaborations among agents, whereas more dominant perspectives emphasizing TEK or scientific knowledge registered intermediate centrality. There was consensus on the need for sustainable developmental options, but the emphasis on combining knowledge still needs convergent solutions.