Compare methods

	Transect Walk	Seasonal Calendar
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1994
Originator	Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition (Robert Chambers and colleagues)	Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition (Robert Chambers and colleagues)
Type	Systematic observational walk along a line across a community with local informants	Participatory visualization of intra-annual variation across activities and conditions
Seminal source	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	Transect Diagram, Walking Transect, Transect Survey, Cross-Section Walk	Seasonal Calendar Diagramming, Seasonality Diagram, Seasonal Activity Matrix, Seasonal Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	A transect walk is a participatory rural appraisal tool in which researchers and local informants walk together along a deliberately chosen line that cuts across the main land-use zones of a community, systematically observing and recording what they see. As they move from, say, riverbank to fields to settlement to hillside, they note soils, vegetation, crops, water, livestock, infrastructure, and the problems and opportunities of each zone. The walk culminates in a transect diagram — a cross-sectional sketch that summarizes how resources and constraints change along the route.	A seasonal calendar is a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tool in which community members chart how key conditions and activities vary across the months or seasons of a typical year on a shared visual matrix. Rows represent variables such as rainfall, crop labour, income, food availability, migration, illness, or expenditure, while columns represent the local division of the year. By filling the cells with stones, marks, or piles whose size shows intensity, participants produce a collective picture of seasonality that reveals when stresses pile up and when slack periods occur.