NOTE: This award was emergency funding granted in response to federal grant cuts. It falls outside CREO’s standard geographic scope of Washington State, and is part of an effort to meet immediate conservation needs in our current volatile funding climate.
Africa’s savanna and forest elephants (Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclotis) are keystone species and their functional presence supports the persistence of myriads of plants, animals and ecosystem processes, significantly influencing landscape vegetation, nutrient cycling and carbon storage. Yet elephants are impacted by numerous direct threats that vary in magnitude and intensity across their range, including poaching for their ivory tusks and retaliatory killing in response to human-elephant conflict (HEC). Habitat degradation, fragmentation and loss, as well as climate impacts, also increase mortality and impact recruitment and movement. As such, and because these species also have significant cultural and national value to many countries across the globe, there is a strong interest in conserving elephants and their essential habitat through targeted action that is science-led and data driven, and decision-making that is holistic and sensitive to community needs.
The overall aim of the project is to assess each African elephant species’ extinction risk via the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (the ‘Red List’) and assess their recovery status for the first time via the IUCN Green Status Assessment of Species ( the ‘GSS’). These assessments are commonly consulted by local, national and international stakeholders to inform their own actions and funding decisions. The Red List assessments affect how species are treated in national legislation and heavily inform the biological criteria of the UN Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for listing in its appendices. Both knowledge products are widely cited by academics, governments and other organizations. As such, the work is expected to have a direct outcome of providing more timely, enhanced data sharing and inference on elephant status and trends to the international conservation community.