Annual Report 2008 - African Wildlife Foundation

Keeping Tabs on Tanzania’s Elephants
Heartland/locale: Kilimanjaro/West side of Mt. Kilimanjaro and
north toward Lake Natron in Tanzania
To protect elephants, you need to know a lot
about their behavior, especially how and
where they move. But because these pachyderms
must cover large distances and cross varied and
rough terrain to ingest enough food and water,
this can be a daunting task — unless, of course,
you are AWF’s Alfred Kikoti. As AWF’s lead
elephant researcher, Alfred has been pioneering
research that crosses borders — the boundaries
of parks, pastoral community lands, and agricultural
ranches — and that straddles two nations.
Field research and reports from local Maasai
game scouts convinced Alfred that elephants
were moving across the Tanzania border into
Kenya and vice versa, putting themselves at risk
and in the way of humans. It was clear that
protecting these elephants required a deeper
understanding of their patterns of movement
and the use of their range.
Since 2005, he has led a
cutting-edge effort to track
elephant movement using
GPS collars fi tted to 23
elephants. Several years of
data incorporated into a
mapping database show beyond a doubt that the
elephants depend on the habitat provided by
West Kilimanjaro Ranch, which AWF and its
partners are securing for conservation.
With ample data collected and the batteries
due to fail, collars were removed from 10
elephants in March and another 6 in November.
Alfred is now preparing to collar elephants in
the far west and northern areas of the region to
collect even more movement data vitally important
for protecting movement corridors.
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