Description

Abstract: The Global Livestock CRSP Sustainable Management of Rural Watersheds (SUMAWA) project has successfully investigated how land management decisions can be compared across multiple stakeholder groups with competing interests in the River Njoro watershed, Kenya via the use of the Spatial Environment and Agricultural Decision Support tool (SEADS). SEADS not only assists in evaluating an array of land use possibilities, but creates an arena for stakeholders and policy makers to communicate with one another as part of the decision making process. In an area such as the River Njoro watershed, where a long-established human interface has strongly influenced environmental processes, a tool like SEADS can increase the effectiveness of the decision making process at both local stakeholder/community and larger policy levels. SEADS is based on multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods and supports a number of modeled data including those from the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), the Modified Soil Loss Equation (MSLE), and total gross margin for crops and livestock. This brief introduces SEADS and provides an Overview of the tools used as part of the spatial decision support system implemented in the River Njoro watershed.