Tracking Elephants for Conservation is our most important project, key to other programmes and collaborations. In the last year Jake Wall has written critical new programs, building on the foundation laid by David Gachuche of Rivercross.

Jake has written a new suite of programs allowing quick and clean output from our database of elephanttracking data in both ESRI and Google Earth formats. Elephant movements can now be viewed in Google Earth on a moving 3D, backdrop of glorious highresolution satellite photos provided by Digital Globe from the Quickbird satellite. The sensation is akin to flying high over the landscape with groups of animated elephants below. High-resolution imagery has also allowed ground truthing and led to insights of how human settlements and water sources are major factors influencing elephant movements. STE is sponsored by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), who produces the world leading ArcGIS software for analysing spatial data. The ESRI software platform has been the base for all our spatial analysis and will be for our new geofencing project and poaching alert software. We have also created a server application which automatically queries the elephant tracking database in Nairobi every hour and refreshes a file posted on the STE Webserver. With a security pass data for the last two weeks all elephants being tracked can be viewed in Google Earth. This tool that allows detailed daily monitoring and replay of the recent past has major potential for improving elephant research, management and security. It could also be tracking other animals or vehicles or ranger patrols. We have also been able to attach stories and events to the elephant movement paths for education purposes. Pop up to photos illustrate stories of individual elephants. For example we used Google Earth for real time tracking of Mountain Bull. We tracked his path across major agricultural fields on Mt.Kenya between the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and the Imenti forest reserve. In July, Mountain Bull crossed the fields and we descended to the ground to follow his exact footprints with the help of an expert game tracker. This calibrated the accuracy of our fixed data points with a meandering track that passed along roads and in and out of crops on his night streak