African Elephants

Since the pioneering behavioral studies of Ian Douglas-Hamilton in Tanzania and Cynthia Moss in Kenya, WCS has provided major support to elephant research and conservation throughout Africa. WCS scientists have developed new techniques for elephant research and monitoring, including forest elephant census methods, aerial videography, genetics, acoustics, and the first satellite telemetry of forest elephants. The goal of WCS elephant research is to provide high quality scientific information in order to support elephant management and reduce human-elephant conflict across Africa. 

The Human Aspect
Elephants are a major attraction for tourists throughout Africa, especially in the open landscapes of eastern and southern Africa. However, rich mineral licks at forest clearings, called “bais”, are common in some Central African forests, and create an intimate setting where you can view as many as 100 elephants at a time. WCS works toward effective management  of tourism so that it can benefit elephant conservation, local people, and national park management.

Threats
Elephants once roamed from the Mediterranean coast to the Cape. However, as human populations expanded across the continent, elephants have retreated into fragmented pockets of habitat. During the 1970s and ‘80s, nearly half of Africa’s elephants were  killed for ivory, including large numbers of forest elephants. While numbers in eastern and southern Africa may have risen in recent years due to improved law enforcement, these re-expanding populations now face another threat as they frequently come into conflict with humans. Elephants often resort to feasting on crops in the farmland that surrounds many protected areas, particularly during dry periods. Elephants can destroy a farmer’s livelihood in a single night of foraging, which creates a major conflict with the local people who tend to see few benefits from elephants. In Central Africa, logging roads are eating into the last forest wilderness areas. Roads provide access to remote areas which facilitates access and therefore poaching for ivory and meat.

WCS Activities
WCS research is showing how elephants are distributed and move across an international landscape. Projects in Mali, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Chad and Central Africa are using new techniques of placing collars with Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking devices on wild elephants in order to record individual movements. These studies provide vital information regarding the migration of elephants across both park boundaries and international borders. This research is instrumental in identifying areas in which elephants are vulnerable to hunting, and more likely to come into conflict with humans. In Dzanga Bai, CAR, WCS researchers have been able to identify over 3,000 individuals, resulting in the first comprehensive data set detailing the life history of forest elephants. This research has recently expanded into neighboring Congo using GPS telemetry and large-scale ecological surveys on foot. A recent collaboration with the Bioacoustics Laboratory of Cornell University is revealing exciting possibilities of using elephant communication that is undetectable by the human ear as a tool to census elephants hidden in the forest.

Research in Zimbabwe is focused on developing new, cost-effective strategies that communities can use in order to reduce the effects of crop-raiding. Experiments using buffer crops and deterrents such as chili powder have proven effective in empowering local communities to reduce elephant damage. Research in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia is also aimed at identifying the effects of poaching on elephant social behavior and reducing the conflicts that arise when elephants leave the protected areas of the park and enter neighboring farmland.

Due to this long history of elephant work in Africa, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) recently asked WCS to coordinate its forest inventories in Central Africa  for the Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants Program  (MIKE). This ambitious, global  undertaking is aimed at providing range state governments with the detailed monitoring information they need to make effective conservation and management decisions. WCS is working with MIKE to develop and implement MIKE, which incluses training personnel, development of survey techniques and conducting elephant surveys in critical areas in order to estimate elephant numbers, gauge the levels of threats, and monitor populations over the long term.

Important Next Steps

• Results from WCS elephant research will be used to reduce illegal killing, conserve critical populations and construct and manage corridors of protected habitat that will allow for the long-range movements of elephants in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Central Africa.
• Successful techniques of reducing the occurrence of human/elephant conflict, developed in Zimbabwe, will be shared with other communities and researchers in order to decrease the negative effects of crop-raiding elephants and other species.
• New community-based research in Zambia is exploring alternatives to poaching that will help local people develop less destructive alternative livelihoods.