At the instigation of Arthur Aspinall, the Presbyterian Church was looking for a building suitable to establish a boarding school for the children of outback pastoralists.
The river was given its gazetted name by an early Australian pastoralist and magistrate, John Jardine, who, on 11 November 1865, named it after the River Annan in Scotland, while on passage in the HMS Salamander.
The Basseri are a nomadic, pastoral tribe of the Fars region of present-day Iran.
The Manatali reservoir formed by the Manantali dam in Mali intersects the migration routes of nomadic pastoralists and destroyed 43000 ha of savannah, probably leading to overgrazing and soil erosion elsewhere.
Though important for agriculture and pastoralism, and flowing through the Niger cities of Maradi, Guidan Roumdji, and Madarounfa, the Goulbi de Maradi is a seasonal river and flows only during the rainy season.
The expedition, which included James Drummond Snr and Samuel Pole Phillips under the command of Captain John Scully, discovered the vast tract of open pastoral land that is now known as the Victoria Plains.
The area is increasingly visited by tourists and is situated at the southern end of a region of Kenya inhabited largely by pastoralist ethnic groups including Il Chamus, Rendille, Turkana and Kalenjin.
It is found in areas of low rainfall such as the Arabian Peninsula inhabited by Bedouins, as well as Northeast Africa inhabited by Somalis (where camel, sheep and goat nomadic pastoralism is especially common).