In a mountainous area of northwest Namibia, known as the Northern Highlands, community game guards have many years of experience in monitoring local wildlife. But until our study there had been no published research specifically on the elephants in the Northern Highlands. The area is highly remote, and the steep, rocky landscape makes traditional monitoring methods difficult for this small population of elephants, both in terms of on-the-ground tracking and aerial surveys. We identified that an alternative approach of estimating the size of the elephant population could be to gather local ecological knowledge of game guards. From this method, we estimated that there are between 78 and 212 elephants in the Northern Highlands, with a best estimate of 128. We identified how the method could be improved and conclude that it would be applicable for longer-term ecological monitoring of trends in population. This cost-effective approach would supplement other approaches such as aerial surveys that can only provide a snapshot of the population estimate once every five years, because of the high costs. The long-term monitoring would be important to inform the planning of adaptive strategies for the protection of elephants, an endangered species.
Wenborn, Michael Svensson, Magdalena S. Nijman, Vincent
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2024Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-11-25