Ten years ago, says Mike Chase, the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area was one fluid contiguous elephant habitat. “An elephant could be in Botswana in the morning, midday in Zimbabwe and in the evening cross over into Zambia or Namibia,” Chase, founder of the conservation NGO Elephants Without Borders, tells Mongabay. “It appears that that vision of an interconnected landscape is now being compromised.” The 520,000-square-kilometer (201,000-square-mile) area known as the KAZA stretches across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It was established in 2006 with a vision of the region’s megafauna roaming free, unencumbered by the constraints of political borders. More than half the world’s savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) live in this transfrontier area. Chase’s EWB, based in Botswana, has just published an analysis comparing the two largest-ever aerial elephant surveys ever completed: the Great Elephant Census, a pan-African survey led by Chase spanning 18 countries and conducted in 2014 and 2015; and the 2022 KAZA Elephant Survey commissioned by the KAZA Secretariat, covering the five countries of the transfrontier conservation area with additional data from a 2018 EWB survey in Botswana. Elephants in the Okavango Delta. Image by Michael Levine-Clark via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Aerial shot of a river in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Image by Mark W Atkinson/WCS via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) “It is critical to have up-to-date information on the size and status of elephant populations to understand the status of the species,” says George Wittemyer, a professor at Colorado State University…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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