Baraza

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: baraza

This is the latest news from Save the Elephants:   A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Save the Elephants published in the open access Journal PloSONE has revealed massive collapse of forest elephant home range in the shrinking wildernesses of the Congo Basin forest.

The researchers fitted Global Positioning System telemetry collars onto 28 forest elephants living in six different national parks in the contiguous forests of Central Africa. Each park was found in a different road-less wilderness, free of major roads, and each wilderness varied in size, from the smallest at just 59km2 to 11,793 km2 (which at the time of the study was the largest wilderness in the Congo Basin excluding swamps).

The GPS tracking data showed that forest elephant home range size was directly related to the area of the roadless wilderness within which they lived. Average home range in the smallest wilderness was just 76 km2, whilst in the then vast Ndoki forest it was 1,284 km2. The largest home range, of a female called Spikey was some 2,226 km2.

The researchers found that forest elephants adopt a “siege” strategy in the face of road encroachment, shrinking their home ranges to avoid proximity to roads that are used by poachers. Only one elephant crossed an unprotected road, streaking across the road 14 times faster than her normal travelling speed. No other elephant was brave enough to attempt such a feat. On the other hand, the collared forest elephants routinely crossed roads that were located inside national parks and thus afforded at least some protection from poaching.

The study highlighted the dramatic decline of forest wilderness taking place in the Congo Basin, as road developments open up the interior of the Basin for logging, mining, and oil production. Since the elephant movement data were collected, the largest road-less wilderness in central Africa, home to one if the most important elephant populations on the continent, has shrunk by 89%, while others have disappeared completely. The consequences for the future of the forest elephant and its habitat are catastrophic.

This is a further challenge to the wisdom of the recent decision taken by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to downlist the conservation status of the African elephant from vulnerable to near-threatened. While African savannah elephant populations appear to be stable in some countries in Southern and Eastern African nations, both forest and savannah elephants in Central Africa are in crisis. “We question the wisdom of down listing the African elephant which appears to have been done on questionable data and assumptions” says Iain Douglas-Hamilton.

However it could all be so different. Development agencies and private enterprise spend billions of dollars in infrastructure development in Africa every year. Yet, planning of road infrastructure takes almost no account of environmental sustainability, focusing almost exclusively on maximizing the efficiency of resource extraction.

The study concludes with a call to arms, not just for forest elephants but for the future of the Congo Basin ecosystem itself. Development planners must harmonize diverse goals in order to optimize the balance between wilderness preservation and livelihood development for the poor, whilst minimizing the costs of natural resource extraction. Failure to do so will see the last great forest wildernesses of Africa, and the elephants they contain, disappear. “Unless we are very very careful, forest elephants and their wilderness home will disappear, silent and unnoticed from beneath the trees of the equatorial forests of central Africa as did the Bison form the great plains of the US. We can change the trend, it is eminently feasible. If we do not, one day we will wake up and the forest elephant will be gone” says Steve Blake. “There is a colossal threat to elephants from encroaching roads into the forest and to the entire diversity of life in that habitat” says Iain Douglas-Hamilton.

This paper by Stephen Blake, Sharon L. Deem, Samantha Strindberg, Fiona Maisels, Ludovic Momont, Inogwabini-Bila Isia, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, William B. Karesh, Michael D. Kock Roadless, Wilderness Area Determines Forest Elephant Movements in the Congo Basin, will be published in PLoS ONE on Tuesday, October 28, with the press embargo ending at 5 p.m. Pacific Time (8 p.m. Eastern) on Monday, October 27. On publication, this paper will be available online at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003546. For further information please contact corresponding author Steve Blake, sblakewcs@gmail.com, (Galapagos Islands) or Iain Douglas-Hamilton +254 7222 04868 (Kenya).