Sustaining indigenous Maasai Alalili silvo-pastoral conservation systems for improved community livelihood and biodiversity conservation in East African rangelands

private Alalili is notifying rangeland managers and experts on the communal Alalili systems that are predicted to face a risk of collapse with regard to the theory of “tragedy of the com- mons” [83, 84]. Efforts therefore should be directed towards increasing the number and size of private Alalili as well as their practices outside protected areas to ensure sustainable fodder and or pasture availability at private pasture land [6, 7, 85]. The existence of both communal and private Alalili would strengthen a sense of rangeland conservation advocacy among Maa- sai pastoralists who maintain their cultural heritage with minimum harmful threats to biodi- versity resources [5, 18, 44]. The observed transition from pastoralism to crop cultivation among Maasai pastoral com- munities has intensified losses in pasture resources with regard to reduced grazing land size and rangeland encroachment with less return on crops [45, 86]. Promoting Alalili would bring about ten times return when sustainable grazing is practiced [13, 17, 18, 23]. Utilization of Ala- lili systems do not only serve as useful in-situ fodder/forage banks but also useful drivers in reducing impacts of overgrazing and rangeland degradation for upgrading the health of biodi- versity and its associated ecosystem services [5, 13, 48]. They play multiple roles such as feed reserves, environmental and wildlife conservation, economic development, mitigating impacts of global climate change including soil erosion, invasive species, and bush encroachment as well as giving ecosystem services [1, 4, 17, 78, 79].

4.2 Occurrence of Alalili systems across land use categories We found that more than half of all Alalili systems in the rangelands of northern Tanzania are found in GCA. This trend suggests that, apart from the largest proportion of land surface occu- pied by GCA (45%) above NCA (20%), open areas (19%), and WMA (16%), promotion of this practice within the GCA might be the reason for this. Other works report that, being commu- nity-based initiatives for protecting wildlife from degradation and fragmentation, the formal institution of GCA and WMA are responsible for administering the limit in accessing the extreme dry season grazing areas [15, 78]. In the NCA there were no private Alalili and that the ownership of land is devoted to the Ngorongoro conservation area authority and not vil- lagers [12, 45]. In the open areas, there was no significant size variation between private and communal Alalili systems suggesting that they face similar encroachment pressures from vil- lagers and village governments [80]. Portions of communal and some private enclosures are changed to potential infrastructural areas where schools, health care centers, markets, and food stores are constructed to support services such as education, health, and other basic necessities [18]. This suggests that LULCC due to the cultural and traditional shift from graz- ing to crop cultivation among the Maasai society, especially in unprotected areas, poses a high pressure on traditionally conserved pastures leading to their loss [45, 46, 87]. Overall, the

potential of Alalili to act as a restoration pathway in the degraded rangeland patches can be a strategy with the potential to be up scaled particularly when the benefits of this practice are re- iterated to the community with a reflection made from Ngitili systems which are multi-func- tional ecosystems [5, 7, 16, 48]. This requires a need for the range map results on the status of Alalili types regarding their size, abundance, and distribution be communicated back to com- munities so they know their extent of disappearance as a wakeup call for them to take measures and action to restore this in their land. We emphasize the need for creating pastoral groups through community champions to promote the intensification of Alalili practices through incentive provisioning such as pay- ments and rewards for ecosystem services, green loans, REDD+, and subsidies [88]. Commu- nities should be proactively engaged and informed about the need to protect this cultural practice by describing the wisdom of ILK on rangeland management associating its values and PLOS ONE Sustaining Alalili systems in rangelands of East Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303649 May 16, 2024 18 / 24