The report’s authors estimate they recorded 93 percent of all savannah elephants in the survey.
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Their cousins from the savannah, by comparison, typically start breeding at 12 and produce a calf every three to four years. “We completed a successful survey of massive scale, and what we learned is deeply disturbing”, said philanthropist and Vulcan founder Paul Allen. It required 81 aircraft and 286 crew flying 494,000km across 18 countries. “The Great Elephant Census tells us we must act, and now”, he said. The GEC is the first continent-wide aerial survey of African elephants.
A total of 352,271 elephants were counted during the survey, representing a decline of 30 percent between 2007-14 equivalent to 144,000 elephants.
An global team of researchers just announced the results of a enormous, two-year elephant census, created to count every savannah elephant in 18 different African countries to see how their populations have changed.
The primary sources for ivory were Mozambique, Tanzania and Congo. He said: ‘I’ve been asked if I’m optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Africa’s elephants, and on days like today, I feel that we are failing the elephants’.
“Armed with this knowledge of dramatically declining elephant populations, we share a collective responsibility to take action, and we must all work to ensure the preservation of this iconic species”, Allen said in a statement. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there were as many as 3-5 million elephants in the early twentieth century. As recently as the 1970s this stood at around one million. This is becoming a major problem because Botswana cannot accommodate so many elephants even without the worst drought.
The count excluded forest elephants which require labour-intensive ground tallies.
“Though the numbers of elephants are still relatively high in these two countries, poaching has had major impacts on populations”, the report shows.
The team counted the mammals from a plane equipped with a camera that also pictured the herds. The pilots adhered to strict height, speed and search rate parameters to reduce the chance of missing elephants during parallel-pattern flights.
Across the entire research area, elephant deaths are exceeding the birth rate.
Wittemeyer said the increase in elephant poaching has been on the rise as a result of globalization.
Even wildlife refuges were not slowing the population slide, they added.
Elephants are likely to become locally extinct in Mali, Chad and Cameroon if current trends continue.
But for all the attention that poaching – and the subsequent decline in elephants – has received, there’s no sign that it will stop anytime soon.
African forest elephants inhabit the dense tropical jungles of central Africa. “This suggests that conflict between humans and elephants is widespread”. But a 2011 census estimated the population to range from 50,000 to 190,000.
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Although the census found that 84 percent of savanna elephants live within officially protected areas, it also noted that they offered little protection and that elephant carcasses were frequently observed in national parks and other supposedly secure areas.
