In the arid highlands of San Luis PotosÃ, Mexico, generations of herders have built a way of life around goats that thrive on thorny desert scrub. A new study published in the journal Pastoralism maps, for the first time in a systematically participatory way, where the social and ecological pressures on this pastoral system converge across the landscape — and shows that the herders who live with those pressures rank them differently than the scientists, officials and civil society groups who study and regulate them.
The research team, led from the Instituto Potosino de Investigación CientÃfica y Tecnológica, worked in the Altiplano Potosino, a roughly 21,510-square-kilometer region of the Southern Chihuahua Desert. Mean annual precipitation there is below 400 millimeters, and the region sits within El Salado, the driest hydrological region in Mexico. Goat herding in the area dates back to the sixteenth century, and the authors refer to the regional system as CaprinoCultura, a term meant to capture its cultural heritage and institutional weight, not just its economics.
The study’s core methodological move was to build a Participatory Vulnerability Assessment Framework, or PVAF, in two phases. Phase 1 characterized the pastoral system across three scales: the household production unit, the ejido (the communal land tenure unit), and the region. Phase 2 translated stakeholder-identified problems into twelve vulnerability criteria, operationalized them with publicly available geospatial data, and combined them through a weighted multi-criteria analysis in a geographic information system. Crucially, the weights came from stakeholders themselves, not from the researchers.
The participatory base was substantial. In 2023, the team conducted semi-structured interviews with 115 pastoralists — 97 men and 18 women — managing goat production units across 17 ejidos in six municipalities. Between late 2023 and early 2024, they ran participatory mapping exercises with 11 pastoralist focus groups, one per ejido, in which herders drew grazing territories, seasonal routes and areas they considered degraded or threatened. Two multi-stakeholder workshops in Matehuala brought together 75 and then 68 participants, including pastoralists, academics, government representatives and non-governmental organizations, who reconstructed the system’s history through “Rivers of Life” exercises and built a collective fuzzy cognitive map of its key drivers.
From this evidence, triangulated across methods, twelve vulnerability criteria emerged: reduced annual precipitation, limited access to urban centers, low suitability of land use and vegetation, exposure to megaprojects, ecosystem degradation, high grazing pressure, communal land governance constraints, terrain steepness, high migration intensity, limited access to watering points, restrictions associated with protected natural areas, and low eligibility for technological support programs. Reduced precipitation was ultimately excluded from the spatial analysis because satellite-derived drought indices showed it was a broadly shared regional stressor with little spatial differentiation; it was retained as regional context.
To weight the remaining indicators, the team surveyed 80 stakeholders in 2025 — 60 pastoralists, 10 academics, 7 government representatives and 3 NGO members — who ranked all twelve indicators from most to least important. Because group sizes differed so much, rankings were averaged within each category first, so the larger pastoralist group could not dominate the composite weighting by numbers alone. Mean ranks were converted to weights through an inverse-rank procedure and normalized to sum to one. Across all groups, vegetation condition and soil degradation received the highest average weights, at 0.12 each, followed by grazing pressure and migration intensity at 0.11 each.
The resulting integrated map, which gave each stakeholder group equal influence, revealed marked spatial heterogeneity. Higher concentrations of vulnerability-associated conditions appeared in Vanegas, Cedral, Matehuala, Villa de Guadalupe, Guadalcázar and Villa Hidalgo, while Charcas, Catorce, Venado, Moctezuma, Santo Domingo, Villa de Ramos and Salinas showed lower and more heterogeneous scores. In Villa de Guadalupe, the convergence was particularly stark: high grazing pressure, reduced vegetation cover measured by a soil-adjusted vegetation index, and moderate-to-extreme soil degradation all overlapped. In some ejidos, the authors report, stocking rates run nearly three times the recommended level of one animal unit per 17 hectares.
The stakeholder-specific maps told a subtler story. Broad spatial patterns were similar across groups, with substantial overlap in high-scoring areas of the central-eastern and northern Altiplano, but the priorities differed in revealing ways. Pastoralists emphasized day-to-day herd and rangeland management — grazing pressure and degradation — which produced higher scores near population centers such as Matehuala, Villa de Guadalupe, Cedral and Vanegas. Government representatives focused on technological support and production constraints; academics highlighted governance and territorial processes, including the risks and incentives of land-tenure change; and civil society organizations weighted youth out-migration and limited access to resources and institutional support most heavily. Despite these differences, the authors note, the groups converged on several core challenges to the system’s long-term viability.
The participatory work also documented the adaptive machinery that maps cannot easily capture. Herders move their animals seasonally between lowlands and mountainous areas, share watering points and grazing routes under ejido-level agreements, and diversify through rainfed milpa agriculture, sale of wild products such as escamoles — ant larvae considered a delicacy — off-farm labor and remittances. Herds typically range from 5 to 100 animals per herder, with breeds including Nubian, Alpine, Boer, Toggenburg, Saanen and Creole, and herders expressed renewed interest in the hardy Granadina breed. But the region’s goat population has been on a rollercoaster: it climbed past 1.2 million head in San Luis Potosà by 1994, collapsed after 1996 amid market exposure, out-migration and droughts in 1998, 2000–2001, 2005 and 2011, and has partially recovered since 2016 under a regional goat program, reaching roughly 772,075 animals in 2022.
The authors are careful about what their index does and does not show. The multi-criteria output, they stress, does not directly measure vulnerability or model causal interactions; it represents the relative spatial convergence of vulnerability-associated conditions based on stakeholder-derived priorities, and should guide further inquiry and locally negotiated responses rather than serve as a definitive classification of territory. Sensitivity analyses supported the stability of the spatial rankings — Spearman’s rank correlations generally exceeded 0.98 under ±20 percent weight changes, and alternative stakeholder aggregation schemes produced highly consistent patterns — but the authors acknowledge that mobility, livelihood diversification and household organization, central to adaptive capacity, could not be consistently spatialized. They also note that equal weighting of stakeholder groups did not erase uneven representation within them, particularly the limited participation of women and younger generations in ejido decision-making. Whether the multisectoral partnership that emerged after the results were discussed translates into sustained collective action, they conclude, remains an open question for adaptive governance in dryland pastoral systems.
Subject of Research: A participatory spatial vulnerability assessment of goat pastoral systems in the Altiplano Potosino, Mexico
Article Title: Understanding social-ecological vulnerability in goat pastoral systems through a participatory multi-stakeholder spatial assessment
Article References: Guzmán-Miranda, A. V., Huber-Sannwald, E., Dávila-Ortiz, R., MartÃnez-Tagüeña, N., Alvarado, F., Mora-Ledesma, M. I., & Velázquez-MartÃnez, M. (2026). Understanding social-ecological vulnerability in goat pastoral systems through a participatory multi-stakeholder spatial assessment. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 17175. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.17175
Image Credits: AI Generated
Keywords: goat pastoralism, Mexico, Altiplano Potosino, social-ecological systems, vulnerability assessment, participatory mapping, multi-criteria analysis, ejidos, rangeland degradation, migration, drylands, adaptive governance
News Source: Courtney Benton. (October 28, 2026). Mapping where goat herding in Mexico is most vulnerable, with herders’ help. Scienmag.
