Linking Local and Transnational Landscapes for Elephant Conservation

Lumbering giants, African elephants can reach heights of 13 feet of muscle, weathered skin and ivory tusks. Weighing twice that of a pickup truck, they can’t even jump. 

Not exactly the gazelles of the world, you’d expect them to cover little ground. Yet African elephants can travel 40 miles a day and nearly 2,500 in a year. While not all elephants migrate, certain parts of the population do.

It makes sense that wildlife corridors, which link animal populations across roads, agriculture or development, are crucial for their conservation. Recently, researchers took this a step further and discovered connectivity at multiple scales — from short to long-distance movements — is vital for elephants.

These efforts matter since African elephants have declined by 60 percent over the last 50 years and are currently endangered. By creating a blueprint of the most critical areas to protect in Southern Africa, these scientists are paving the way to preserve the world’s largest land dweller.

Landscape connectivity study

Much like their study subject, the research team — from universities, governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, Ecoexist and Elephant Connection — went big. They assembled one of the largest datasets of GPS-collared African elephants in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Spanning Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, this region is a mix of parks, formally protected areas, game reserves, communal lands and areas housing millions of people. 

“It’s an area where all of the large, charismatic, iconic African wildlife that we think of lives — your lions, elephants, rhinos, giraffes and so on,” said Robin Naidoo, a lead wildlife scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and the lead author of the study. “These are all creatures that require a lot of space to live. They don't respect national borders. Their space needs aren't defined in the same way that ours are. So the vision of this transfrontier conservation landscape is to allow those types of animals to move as freely as possible.”

Besides crossing boundaries and a matrix of land uses, large-scale fencing in the region can limit elephant movement, particularly of female elephants and their young, Naidoo said.

Maintaining connectivity is essential for wildlife. By allowing animals to move and migrate, corridors provide access to food, shelter and mates. This lets them adapt to environmental changes like development and global warming, while also improving the genetic diversity of populations. 

These corridors also benefit local residents, since healthy wildlife populations bring in tourists. For instance, travel and tourism contribute over 11 percent to the gross domestic product of both Botswana and Namibia, supporting thousands of jobs.

“The hope is that by doing conservation, we're not only benefiting nature and biodiversity but also people,” Naidoo said. “The question is: How can this vision be achieved? And to do that, one of the fundamental things that we need to understand is: Where, when, and how are these animals moving across the landscape?”

Small steps 

Despite the importance of connectivity, not all paths are the same. On the smallest scale, micro-corridors are used for quick, directed movements, often toward water. 

“Those micro-corridors are extremely important because this is a pretty dry area,” Naidoo said. “Elephants, as you can imagine, are huge animals that need to drink a lot of water. And we expect that these types of micro-corridors are only going to get more and more important as time goes on because, as we know, the climate is getting hotter. It's getting drier. And at the same time, there's more and more people out on the landscape.”

These pathways are often created in areas with a heavy human presence, making them especially useful. 

“If these areas are maintained in a pretty intact state so that animals can continue to use them, there's less likelihood that these animals will then travel through these heavily human-dominated areas and run into trouble and be dangerous to people,” Naidoo said. “It's beneficial for both the wildlife and the people to maintain these corridors intact.”

Corridors, for instance, can deter elephants from moving through fields and villages to access water. Bypassing fields could also reduce the amount of crops eaten by elephants, Naidoo said. This, in turn, lowers the chances that farmers will kill elephants or be injured by one.

Longer jaunts

On the other end of the elephant travel options are macro-corridors, which allow long-distance dispersal and migration.

“Elephants are moving hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometers,” Naidoo said. “The macro-corridors are really areas that permit the broadest scale and types of movements.”

For instance, during the wet season when elephants are no longer confined to permanent water sources, they disperse to seek out new vegetation, Naidoo said.

In between these two scales are pathways connecting protected areas. The transfrontier conservation area is dotted with multiple national parks and game reserves, but a single protected area may not be large enough to support all the needs of large animals like elephants, so movement between them is important.

Landscape conservation

Mapping out this network of paths — small, medium and large — ideally facilitates protection. But a few roadblocks are in the way. 

In most cases, the various types of elephant paths don’t overlap, so conservation plans would need to consider all types. And while some corridors are designated, many aren’t.

“We need to set aside these lands if we're concerned about biodiversity,” Naidoo said. “But if we set aside these lands, there's an opportunity cost to that. They can't be used for agriculture or other types of human uses.”

Despite these challenges, the study is already yielding positive results. 

“Now that we've been able to identify where those corridors are, it allows us to move into phase two,” Naidoo said. “That involves identifying these micro-corridors, getting involved in community engagement, understanding the motivations and incentives that people might have to conserve these corridors and trying to bolster those, talking to various levels of government to see if they can be formally gazetted and given some type of protection. All those types of things that will allow these applied research results to be transformed into effective conservation policy and practice.” 

For example, the micro-corridor results, along with work by land authorities and NGOs, will be used to help designate elephant corridors in an upcoming land-use project in Botswana. Though this study focused on elephants, the researchers are also studying if other species use these corridors. 

Because elephants roam over such large areas, protecting them preserves many other species. Elephants impact their environment by dispersing seeds, modifying their habitat, and influencing plant and animal diversity. 

An elephant-sized impact

Conserving such a wide-ranging species requires cooperation at multiple levels, from researchers to government officials.

“All of this collaboration happened under the auspices of a secretariat that has been empowered to manage and organize these types of transfrontier conservation efforts in this area,” Naidoo said. “Without that higher-level government cooperation amongst these five countries, I don't think this project would have happened.” 

It’s a good lesson in tackling tricky conservation problems — one step at a time.