Organization: Wildlife Conservation Network – Save The Elephants (WCN-STE)

Project Location: Kenya

Web address: http://www.wildnet.org

Title of Grant: “Ewaso Tracking Project”

Grant Amount: $199,000 over 2 years

Principal Investigator: Iain Douglas-Hamilton

Organization Background:

The Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN) is dedicated to protecting endangered species and preserving their natural habitats. The organization partners with independent conservationists around the world who live and work with local communities and are exploring new ways to resolve the conflicts between people and wildlife.  WCN provides these conservation entrepreneurs with financial, technical and administrative support. To magnify the effectiveness of their work, WCN sustains a strong network of wildlife supporters through which champions of conservation may learn from each other and communicate directly with passionate donors.

One of WCN’s partners is Save the Elephants (STE) whose mission is to secure a future for elephants and to sustain the ecological integrity of the places where they live; to promote delight in their intelligence and the diversity of their world, and to develop a tolerant relationship between the two species.  STE was founded in 1993 by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who made a pioneering study of elephant behavior in the late 1960s in Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania, and has worked on elephant status Africa-wide since.

Grant Description:

The “Ewaso Tracking Project” or ETP will exploit and build upon the results and expertise gained from the award winning GSM Animal Tracking Project, conducted by Save the Elephants with the continuing support of the Safaricom and Vodaphone Foundations. The technical expertise and results on tracking technology obtained from STE’s elephant-tracking using GSM/GPS solutions will in the project be disseminated to collaborating partners as well as the international community and deployed within the broader perspective of wildlife conservation and management in the Ewaso Ecosystem. These bioinformatics will be used to work towards the conservation of keystone and endangered wildlife species and their habitats.

The Problem:

Monitoring animals and their movements and migrations are an important part of studies of animal behavior, ecology and conservation. However, such data are of little value unless put into the proper context i.e. the framework of what has become known as biodiversity informatics. WCN-STE believes that analytical tools and data will thus contribute to better local conservation management and, by integration with the work of other groups, lead to a better understanding of both mammal ecology and dry bush-land ecosystems throughout Africa and elsewhere. The key of sustainable conservation lies in the ability to balance the needs and requirements of the plants, animals and humans that share an ecosystem. Biodiversity and social information are the keys to understanding these often conflicting needs. In the case of the Ewaso ecosystem, specifically, the issues of core ‘reserves’ linked by migration ‘corridors’, and the potential severance of these links, are of great importance. Detailed tracking data will be a key
dataset to tackle and it will be a case where bioinformatics can help not only with basic research but also directly with landscape planning and conservation of endangered species and their habitats.

The Solution:

The project aims to improve the conservation of endangered and important wildlife species in the EWASO ecosystem by integrating GPS-GSM tagging technology as a key element in ongoing and new wildlife research programmes. WCN-STE will obtain, analyze and integrate spatial information on the human land-use component including settlements and livestock movements. Thus this is not principally a monitoring project but a project aimed towards the gathering of key ecological information and its dissemination to the broader community of academics and policy makers. STE’s modern tracking technology, coupled with a unique, decadelong data-set (of high-resolution elephant data) provides a model data-base with examples of integration of tracking data from a range of sources into one data-base as well as ways to link tracking data to satellite and GIS data-layers. WCN-STE will further develop the tools necessary for data ‘cleaning’, extraction and analysis. Finally, sub-sets of the data will be readily accessible for both, the specialist user and the wider public.

Global Impact: