The long-term monitoring (LTM) of the Samburu elephants is the core project on which all other Save the Elephants projects depend. David Daballen has been in charge of the field team recording the elephants for the last five years and through GPS tracking, STE has gathered fine-scale data on elephant movements, identifying specific elephant corridors and core parts of their range, and highlighting the need for an ecosystem approach to conservation by protecting the whole elephant range, rather than only isolated, protected areas. STE is using three different types of collars, including those with satellite downloading capabilities (African Wildlife Tracking/Inmarsat) and those with VHF downloading (Lotek and Televilt), in a comparison of the cost, robustness, data quality and reliability of the different systems. Tracking free-ranging elephants with GPS collars in the Samburu and Laikipia rangelands reveals how home areas, hotspots and connecting corridors are used.

The Samburu/Laikipia ecosystem in northern Kenya covers approximately 23,000 km2 consisting of a land-use mosaic of national reserves, private and community wildlife conservancies, private ranches, grazing areas, and intensive cultivation. Elephants are essentially free ranging across this landscape and threats to elephants vary in different parts of their range. Home sectors and hotspots tend to lie in protected areas. Connecting corridors typically cross through unprotected habitat and elephants move faster along corridors than elsewhere in their range, a phenomenon termed streaking, which suggests they might be aware of danger in unprotected range. It appears that the animals make unexpectedly complex use of protected and unprotected areas. Elephant movements determined from GPS tracking have assisted in defining the elephant range in Samburu and Laikipia and thus delineating the boundaries of the site for Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE), part of a global programme to study trends in elephant mortality and the potential impact of ivory trade on populations of African and Asian elephants.

To monitor the elephants successfully the STE field team drives along routes which divide the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves into subsections.  These routes, when followed at regular intervals, allow us to locate all the elephants within the park and thus indicate any population changes along with the elephants’ movements, behavior, birth and death rates.  We also obtain the satellite position of each observation using a GPS so that we can understand the demographics of the elephants in the reserves.

The results from the LTM project  have been fascinating.  We are now able to confirm that since 1998 the elephant population here has been growing, and continued to do so last year.  If poaching should surge again we will detect the trend immediately. We are also beginning to understand more of the subtleties of specific individual elephant and herd behavior.  For example the Rift Lakes is an elephant family that appears in the park for only one month each year, generally between August and September, when it is extremely dry and when most other elephants are elsewhere due to the lack of food.  We have seen over time that the Rift Lakes are less dominant than most other families encountered in the area and it may well be that they cannot compete for resources with other families.

This theory is further seen during the rainy season when approximately 700 elephants are found in the reserves enjoying more abundant food and water, but the Rift Lakes are notably absent.  It may be that they need a certain plant found in the park but can only come to feed on it at the driest time when the other elephants are not around. Further long term monitoring will help solve this question! GPS tracking has also shown that some bulls still use ancient migratory routes, passing through hostile areas and intensive cultivation, to move between Samburu/Laikipia, Meru and Mt. Kenya. This is direct evidence that these populations, although believed to be isolated from one and other by encroachment and human settlement, are still interconnected through the movement of bulls, and has defined the corridors that elephants use to move from one population to another.

The LTM project is what keeps us in tune with elephant behavior and how planning and management can meet their needs.  It helps us to identify if elephants are being forced to compete over dwindling resources with encroaching livestock for example.  We are then able to tackle the problems as they develop.