Forest Elephants – A Last Chance
Our Goal: We seek to help conserve the second largest block of rainforest on earth and the biodiversity that it harbors, by focusing on forest elephants as key architects of those forests, and using innovative acoustic tools at the scale of landscapes.
Katy Payne on Elephants
Bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne is co-founder of the Elephant Listening Project, which uses acoustic methods to study and aid in the conservation of forest elephants in Central Africa.
Eavesdropping on Elephants
Elephants use low frequency sounds to communicate. These sounds are mostly below the range of human hearing but we feel them as “pulsations” in the air. In Africa these sounds may travel as far as 10 km and serve to coordinate elephant herds.
Conservation
Forest elephants are disappearing at a frightening rate. More than 60% were lost in just the recent decade and more than 12,000 are killed each year for their ivory. While the picture is grim, there is considerable hope for forest elephants – if we make the right decisions now!
Forest ElephantsForest elephants have the best chance of any elephant species to persist with their full range of behaviors and landscape movements because there still are huge expanses of relatively unexploited forest in Central Africa (the second largest tropical forest landscape on earth), and the human population density is relatively sparse and urban.
- Elephant Research
Basic research, and applying what we learn directly to enhance conservation efforts, is a primary focus of the Elephant Listening Project. About equal effort is targeted at gathering new data from the forests of Central Africa, pushing the boundaries of how we can use acoustic monitoring to achieve conservation goals, and building capacity in Central Africa to ensure sustainable conservation into the future.
- Conservation
Forest elephants face the threats of poaching for ivory and habitat loss common to other elephants, but they also face increased pressure from hunting for meat, accelerating extraction of natural resources, and little development of an ecotourism industry that could provide alternative value. Together with their slow reproductive rate, these threats raise huge challenges to their conservation
- Outreach & Building Capacity
Sustainable conservation will only be achieved through buy-in by regional governments and populations, and a key component of this is a critical mass of committed local conservationists with the skills to do good science and to communicate their enthusiasm for biodiversity conservation to their communities.
