Enhancing rice field resilience: Pioneering Ecologically-Based Rodent Management in the Senegal River delta

Enhancing rice field resilience: Pioneering Ecologically-Based Rodent Management in the Senegal River delta.

In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural intensification programs increase the risk of rodent proliferation in rural habitats. This poses significant challenges to both food security and public health. However, conventional rodent control methods frequently are reactive and based on inproper use of chemical poisons, which carry environmental and health risks without significant improvement in terms of reduction of rodent populations. Ecologically-Based Rodent Management (EBRM) has been proposed as a realistic alternative to chemical control. EBRM is based on a good knowledge of rodent biology, as well as on community-based interventions aimed at reducing rodent abundances to economically and healthily acceptable levels over the long term. EBRM has been successfully implemented and evaluated in Southeast Asian agro-ecosystems and has recently shown promises in smaller-scale trials in rural areas of Southern and Eastern Africa. However, to our knowledge, attempts are still lacking in West Africa.

We present results from an original pioneering study that combined (i) Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) survey conducted among farmers in 18 villages in the delta of River Senegal and (ii) a farmers-scientists joint experiment implemented in rice fields to test two EBRM methods during the hot-dry growing season (March-July 2023). This small-scale pilot experiment focused on assessing the efficacy of two EBRM methods: mechanical rodent control and Linear-Trap Barrier System (L-TBS). Our approach used the capture-mark-recapture (CMR) method to estimate rodent composition and density, as well as crop monitoring to estimate yield and damage at different spatial scales (256 replicated rice tillers, for a total of 30 rice fields) in experimental and control plots. We also aimed to test the effectiveness and local appropriateness of the two EBRM methods.