Restoring the collapsed iconic wildebeest migration in Kenya’s Masai Mara Ecosystem
Written by Imogen Schwandner & Dr. Joseph Ogutu
June 9th 2025
Wildebeest crossing Mara River. Photo credit: Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay
The impact of fencing on migration and pastoralism
In the world-renowned Kenya’s Masai Mara Ecosystem, livestock pastoralists and migratory wildebeest, zebra, Thomson’s gazelle and eland are constantly on the move, seeking greener pastures and drinking water. Yet their movements are increasingly constrained by fences built on recently privatized land. This severely limits livestock and wildlife responses to climate extremes, such as droughts, threatening the traditional pastoralist way of life, blocking migrations and, therefore, diminishing populations of migratory species.
The collapse of the Mara-Loita migration
One disturbing result is the recent collapse of the once spectacular Mara-Loita migration. Fencing caused substantial connectivity losses along the historic migration routes, forcing the herds to alter their movements. As fences became denser, such adaptations became increasingly impossible. This led to the migration’s collapse, and confined the few remaining herds to the wildlife conservancies. The fences in the area, therefore, carried grave consequences by preventing the Mara-Loita migrants from accessing their traditional wet-season feeding and calving grounds on the Loita Plains, portending an insecure future for those that remain.
Wildebeest entangled in livestock fence. Photo credit: Daniel Sopia, Masai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association
The Role of Land Privatization and Subdivision
The privatisation and subdivision of communal land across the Mara region triggered a surge in fencing in the 1980’s, and a more recent acceleration in the last 15 years. This contributed to the loss of 75% of the Mara-Loita wildebeest population between 1977 and 2022, mirroring a broader pattern of dramatic and sustained wildlife declines across Kenya (70% between 1977 and 2013). These losses are primarily caused by human activities that fragment landscapes and, therefore, reduce the habitat quality for Kenyan wildlife.
Urgent calls for conservation action
“These developments highlight the urgent need for policymakers and conservationists to incentivize private landowners to remove fences and restore connectivity within critical wildlife and livestock habitats. If immediate and decisive action is not taken, the swift and extensive changes reshaping this ecosystem may soon make such efforts impossible”, says Dr. Joseph Ogutu of the University of Hohenheim, Germany.
Community-led conservation efforts
Community wildlife conservancies around the Masai Mara National Reserve, including the Pardamat Conservation Area, are now racing against time. They are engaging with and compensating landowners to remove fences and halt or reverse these alarming trends, working toward achieving mutual benefits.
“By removing 347 km of fences, Pardamat Conservation Area and Maasai landowners, together are restoring key wildlife corridors that improve habitat connectivity, and foster population growth, despite Kenya’s unfolding wildlife crisis”, says Pardamat Conservation Area Manager, Jackson Sasine.
Promising research into solutions
In our recent publication we used historic and contemporary movement data from GPS tracking collars to identify migratory routes of wildebeest before and during fence construction in the region. Fencing was hand-mapped or digitised by several local partners and is available as an online database. Connectivity levels in both time periods were modelled using Circuitscape. We then predicted connectivity gains from simulated fence removal along historic movement corridors and evaluated the impact of different corridor widths and locations on connectivity and removal costs derived from locally implemented interventions, such as in Pardamat.
Map of the Greater Mara Ecosystem with the Masai Mara National Reserve (solid grey) and the outer Mara conservancies (black outline) showing broad wildebeest migratory movement (light green) between the Mara and the Loita Plains. The footprint of fencing is shown (light grey lines), and the historic movement corridors (green arrows) suggested for restoration, which were derived by tracking wildlife movements.
Photo credit: Joseph Ogutu
Hope for restoration: fence removals and strategic corridors
Our findings reaffirm the importance of maintaining open routes for migratory species and underscore the urgent need to restore connectivity to blocked or degraded routes This can primarily be achieved by removing fences. Restoring these historic pathways allows people, livestock and wildlife to adapt more effectively to climate change.
We found that smaller, strategically placed corridors (narrow passages along key routes rather larger plots of land), linking the Mara Reserve, the Community wildlife conservancies and the Loita Plains, can outperform larger, more costly interventions in less suitable areas. Spatial planning in fence removal efforts and connectivity conservation interventions, such as conservancy formation or movement corridors, together with removing fences in the Loita Plains, would help revive the large-scale movements of the collapsed Mara-Loita migration.
The revival of such migration routes has been successful elsewhere. Zebras in Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans, pronghorn in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of the United States, and Mongolian gazelles in Mongolia’s eastern Steppe, have all quickly recovered their lost migratory routes once fences were removed and connectivity restored. Concluding, we believe, that the study’s framework can be applied more widely to mitigate linear barriers, such as roads, railways and pipelines, which increasingly constrain wildlife movements globally.
Author information
Imogen Schwandner, Doctoral Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin
imogen.schwandner@hu-berlin.de
&
Dr. Joseph Ogutu, Researcher at the University of Hohenheim, Germany
jogutu2007@gmail.com
Source citation
Schwandner, I. A., Morrison, T. A., Hopcraft, J. G. C., Wall, J., Hughey, L., Boone, R. B., Ogutu, J. O., Jakes, A. F., Kifugo, S. C., Limo, C., Ndambuki Mwiu, S., Nyaga, V., Olff, H., Ojwang, G. O., Sairowua, W., Sasine, J., Senteu, J. S., Sopia, D., Worden, J., & Stabach, J. A. (2025). Predicting the impact of targeted fence removal on connectivity in a migratory ecosystem. Ecological Applications, 35(1), e3094. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.3094
Editor:
Johanna Märtz
Cite this summary:
Schwandner, I. & Ogutu, J. (2025). Restoring the collapsed iconic wildebeest migration in Kenya’s Masai Mara Ecosystem. Edited by Märtz, J. TransportEcology.info, Accessed at: https://transportecology.info/research/masaimarafencing