The results should be taken as a major wake-up call.
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The team used small aircraft to fly over enormous swaths of land, recording themselves counting and photographing the elephants they saw. In contrast to Namibia and Zimbabwe’s proposals, a group of 29 African countries from West, Central and East Africa united under the African Elephant Coalition (AEC), which covers 70% of the elephant range, earlier this year tabled a suite of five proposals to be presented at CoP 17.
The Great Elephant census – a project funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – surveyed 18 countries in Africa, accounting for 93 percent of the savanna elephant population. It required 81 aircraft and 286 crew flying 494,000km across 18 countries.
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The first comprehensive research into forest elephant demographics found that even if poaching was curbed, it will take almost 100 years for the species just to recover the losses suffered in the past decade.
The populations in the various countries thereby significantly bounced back between 1995 and 2007. Red landscapes indicate a decline of more than 5 percent per year.
The paper’s findings show the forest elephant is particularly susceptible to poaching, vital information for debates and upcoming policy legislation regarding the legality of ivory trade to be decided at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ World Conservation Congress and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species conference in September.
That’s a daunting projection, but the study doesn’t go so far as to say forest elephants are threatened with extinction. Since then poaching has escalated dramatically.
“Although these statistical tools were out there”, Griffin notes, “they had never been applied before to elephant populations”. By 1979, that number was a mere 1.3 million. As recently as the 1970s this stood at around one million. The hunt for these elephants is all about the ivory trade and places a larger burden on them than they could bear.
It might sound like a pretty basic technique, but the team says this is the most accurate and non-invasive way they have to establish population numbers. Their numbers there are not encouraging. The new survey finds tens of thousands of elephants are being killed each year. “Even for Gabon, high density populations were found in only 14% of the forest”. The pilots adhered to strict height, speed and search rate parameters to reduce the chance of missing elephants during parallel-pattern flights.
Areas colored red in the map below show pockets where the death of elephants has been most acute.
Devastatingly low numbers of elephants were found in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southwest Zambia.
This calculation, however, is estimated considering that current poaching practices continue in Africa.
Forest elephants were not included in the GEC as a count of these animals requires labour-intensive ground work, and they are historically unreliable due to the density of the animals’ habitat.
Wilson believes that people need to take action to actively protect elephants.
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The goal of the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Applied Ecology, was “to fill in the massive lack of understanding of the basic biology of forest elephants”, Wittemyer said. “This suggests that conflict between humans and elephants is widespread”.
