Ceva Wildlife Research Fund supports a fascinating research project in South Africa about elephant population management

Since 1850, African elephant populations have experienced a dramatic decline. Originally estimated at several million individuals, their numbers have plummeted to approximately 415,000 today. The first massive wave of decline (1880-1920) was linked to the ivory trade, which decimated populations across the continent as European powers exploited Africa’s resources.

A second critical period occurred in the 1970s-80s with a loss of nearly 50% of remaining populations due to intensive poaching. In response, the CITES Convention banned international ivory trade in 1989, which temporarily reduced poaching pressure. Many countries strengthened their anti-trafficking sanctions, with some nations like Kenya famously burning ivory stockpiles to demonstrate zero tolerance.

Despite these protective measures, the crisis reemerged in the early 2000s as ivory demand surged, particularly in Asian markets where prices skyrocketed from around $700 to $2,100 per kilogram between 2010 and 2014. This price surge fueled an unprecedented poaching crisis that peaked in 2011 when an estimated 7% of all African elephants were killed in a single year. The ongoing threat was confirmed by a comprehensive aerial survey by Chase et al. (2016), which documented a shocking 30% decline in savanna elephants across 18 African countries in just seven years (2007-2014).

Other significant threats include habitat loss due to agricultural expansion, human population growth, infrastructure development, and escalating human-elephant conflicts as their ranges increasingly overlap. These combined pressures continue to challenge conservation efforts despite increased international awareness and protection measures.

Today, the majority of elephant populations are found within national parks and protected areas, where conservation efforts have helped stabilize their numbers in some regions. However, this conservation success has created new challenges. In some of these protected areas, the absence of natural predators and elephants’ high reproductive rate, reaching up to 5-6% per year, have led to localized overpopulation. This creates a different ecological concern as these dense populations put excessive pressure on ecosystems through deforestation, depletion of resources, and negative impacts on other species, highlighting the complex balance required in modern conservation management.

To address this, managers often set a target density, known as the ecosystem’s “carrying capacity” for elephants. This situation is common in small, fenced reserves, particularly in South Africa, where many have chosen to regulate elephant numbers through contraception, mainly in females for a stronger population effect. However, this “carrying capacity” is often based on uncertain literature rather than solid local data. Alongside the increasing use of contraception, there is also growing recognition that, beyond controlling elephant numbers, maintaining a gradient of impacts across the landscape is crucial for supporting biodiversity.

This three-year project aims to develop and test an adaptive approach to elephant management based on their space use, combining literature review, field-based GPS studies, and modeling. Elephant populations have complex and varied impacts on ecosystems, making it difficult to define a precise “carrying capacity” through field studies alone. Instead, understanding how elephants use the landscape, particularly the variability in their movement and habitat use, could serve as a key metric for guiding management decisions.

The project focuses on populations where contraception is a viable control method, aiming to generate new knowledge that will help refine mathematical models for conservation planning. Given the long lifespan and slow reproduction of elephants, such models are crucial for anticipating population dynamics and ensuring sustainable management strategies. By considering space use of elephants, this approach seeks to provide a more comprehensive and ecologically sound approach of elephant management. The first GPS collars, 32 to this day, have been deployed thanks to the efforts of the veterinarian team of Ezemvelo, the Parks’ managing institution.

An elephant movement model is being developed to simulate elephant distribution under various scenarios.