STE and Google Earth

For a long time, conservation and technology evolved independently. Today, conservation has inextricable links with information technology, and innovative solutions to conservation problems now abound. STE’s ground-breaking collaboration with Google Earth is one such success story.

Author(s)

Save the Elephants

Date Published

Google has worked with STE for over a decade in order to create the ultimate tool to visualise elephant movements. More recently we have also begun working with the Vulcan Foundation to start unifying elephant movements with other data streams to aid conservation.

Through the custom add-ons to Google Earth that were developed for elephants, we are now able to view and display elephant movements to a wide array of audiences. This is important when speaking to local communities about the elephants in their region, when speaking to regional and national landscape planners about infrastructure developments and also for engaging the wider public – including China – on the wonder of elephant lives.

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The Daily Movements of Samburu's Elephants

A short visualisation of STE’s tracking data for the elephants using the Ewaso Nyiro river in Samburu, northern Kenya, produced by Google Earth Outreach. The elephants can be seen gathering at the river during the heat of the day and dispersing to grazing areas on higher ground at night time.