The means at our disposal were exceptional: a budget of more than one million dollars, a fleet of vehicles, a twin-engine aircraft, a 1:50 000 photographic coverage in Infrared Color, commissioned to the French National Geographic Institute, IGN. The human resources were equally considerable: some thirty Malian and international researchers and collaborators divided into several teams: • A team of ecologists under the direction of Pierre Hiernaux, Mohamed Idrissa Cissé and Lassine Diarra. • A team responsible for studies and for the mapping of pastoral land tenure under the direction of Salmana Cissé, Samba Soumaré and Jérôme Marie. • An team for aerial surveys (including cattle counting) under the direction of Kevin Milligan, David Bourn and William Wint. • A team responsible for the study and implementation of a reform of territories and uses that regulate access to natural resources. This work was directed by Salmana Cissé, Alain Rochegude (a lawyer) and Jérôme Marie. • Finally, a team based at ILCA headquarters in Addis Ababa, in charge of mapping. Mark Haywood, his director, made several visits to the fields with Pierre Hiernaux. He realized the whole photo-interpretation, defined and coordinated the drawing of the cartographic system. Land tenure crews charged with registering the leyde boundaries, pastoral trails, and resting camps worked directly on the 1:50 000 topographic background maps developed by Mark Haywood. This resulted in a report entitled "Seeking a solution to the problems of animal husbandry in the Inner Delta of the Niger in Mali", handed over to the Government of Mali and the ODEM in March 1983. The five volumes (1100 pages) dealt with : 1 . Rangelands in the study area (their floristic composition, ecological conditions, production, etc.) 2 . The distribution and density of livestock in different seasons obtained by systematic aerial surveys. 3 . Geographical and socio-economic monographs covering all the leyde (Fulani pastoral territories in the Delta), dealing with villages, population, the organization of transhumance, land conflicts, etc. 4 . A legal analysis proposing solutions to solve conflicts between pastoralists, fishermen and farmers. In particular, we advocated the replacement of leyde by agro-pastoral units, territorial communities headed by an elected council whose competence would be to regulate the use of resources (land, water, pastures, etc.) among the various holders of rights. These reports were accompanied by detailed maps in three layers: • The maps of the Niger Inland Delta rangelands (27 maps at 1:50 000 scale in 80x50 cm format). But also the map of the rangelands of the 'Delta mort' and the Office du Niger (31 maps in the 1: 100 000 format 40x28cm) and the maps of the continental rangelands to the West and North (6 IGN topographic maps 1: 200,000). • Pastoral land mapping of the Inland Delta of the Niger covering the 31 leyde (Fulani pastoral territories) of the Delta. This cover, rigorously superimposable to the previous one, bore the detailed hydrographic network, the relief elements (hills or "togge" ), the villages and hamlets cultivated, the pastoral tracks inside the Delta (over 3,600 km) pastoral gîtes (over 1,000), toponymy, land disputes over lodges, trails or leyde boundaries. • Maps of agricultural land use, comparing 1952 and 1974/75 (Haywood M. 1981. "Evolution of land use and vegetation in the Sudano-Sahelian zone of the ILCA project in Mali", Doc. Working Group 3, ILCA, Addis Ababa, 187 p.). This work was not implemented and its results were never published, for several reasons: • Implementation would have required the establishment of relations between the populations and the administrations concerned on a decentralized and democratic basis, which was not the case at the time. The decentralization that took place under the Third Republic, which led in 1999 to the creation of rural communes and the election of municipal councils, now offers more favorable political conditions for the local management of natural resources, as our study advocated at the time. Despite the success of the two experimental units, in 1983 the Malian political power was not ready for such a radical reform. • ILCA engaged in the study only at the urgent request of the World Bank. No provisions had been made for a publication beyond the delivery of the reports and maps to ODEM as specified in the contract. Besides, such a publication would have been at odds with the ILCA policy in those days, which was more focused on animal production development projects. Our concern about pastoral land tenure was largely misunderstood by our supervisors at that time.... • But the main reason was our inability to perform syntheses, or modeling and spatial analysis operations on such a mass of data in the absence of powerful computing tools. In 1983, computers still used heavy, slow and expensive systems. GIS was virtually non-existent and satellite remote sensing was in its infancy (SPOT, for instance, had not yet been launched). Pierre Hiernaux, for example, treated his phyto-ecological observations with punch cards. When Mark Haywood wanted to quantify the area of ​​the «bourgoutières» in the Delta in 1983, he had to cut out the plots representing this plant species formation and then weigh the paper pieces to deduce the area!