Africa’s forest elephants are running out of space

Easier access for hunters means fewer elephants August 2011: The survival of the forest elephants of Central Africa depends on limiting human access to rainforests, according to new Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) research.

The study says that entry points to the rainforests facilitated by roads, rivers, or other access points have led to more hunters and fewer elephants. Furthermore, roads and other forms of infrastructure construction in the countries where forest elephants still exist usually lack adequate, or any, anti-poaching efforts, putting the future of Africa's lesser known cousin of the savanna elephant in peril.

‘While the science behind testing the effects of access to forest elephant habitat is necessarily complex, the bottom line is pretty obvious, and our findings support the hypothesis that multiple access points to tropical forests are detrimental to elephants and other wide ranging species,' said Dr Samantha Strindberg of the WCS.

Logging roads can have a devastating effectBuilding upon previous studies that examined the effects of roads on forest elephant densities, the researchers looked at the effects of multiple access points by systematically counting and mapping the location of elephant dung across large landscapes. Dung counts are necessary because forest elephants are elusive animals and difficult to count directly, so their dung provides a rough index of abundance.

The study showed that the negative impacts of hunting of species such as forest elephants extend far from settlements and other access points because these species range over such large distances.

Researchers found that levels of human presence in different landscapes varied between the five national parks considered in the study. For instance, Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo contains many human settlements and far fewer dung piles than Minkébé National Park in Gabon, which has only recently been made accessible to humans by the construction of logging roads.

Could lead to general ecosystem decayThe conservation implications of the study underscore the need for development plans on both local and national levels in the Congo Basin.

Dr Charles Yackulic, the study's lead author, said: ‘The proliferation of access points to formerly remote, inaccessible areas is devastating to elephants and other wide-ranging species. Forest elephants' disappearance is the herald of more widespread declines in wildlife which may lead to general ecosystem decay.'

Dr Steve Blake of WCS and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology added: ‘Unfortunately, governments, development agencies, and private industry - all of which fuel infrastructure development - have known this for a long time, and still little is being done to improve the geography of infrastructure planning at local, national and regional levels.

The time to do things right is running out‘This latest study underscores the fact that time is running out to do things right. The good news is that there is a tiny window of opportunity still available to develop the Central African interstate highway system in a strategic way that maximizes social benefits to people while minimising ecological impacts such as fragmentation and access proliferation.

‘The problem is that in reality this costs more money than the current free for all infrastructure development led by the private sector, in which cost minimization is the primary consideration. Like so many environmental issues we could have a pretty decent win-win for wildlife and people if only the world was prepared to pay a little more.'
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