RESEARCH
Research
Conducting research about African elephants is vital to their conservation, since it helps us to understand their behaviour, resource requirements, and responses to changing environmental conditions. Our research focuses on male elephants, who have been relatively little studied to date, but can present more challenges to conservation than breeding herds. Males cover great distances, often breaking through fences and walking close to human settlements, where they can be responsible for crop raiding, damage to property and, occasionally, fatal interactions with humans. While these issues can also be caused by breeding herds, some areas are home to predominantly male populations, and interactions between males are very different to those between elephants in a breeding population. Studying male elephant behaviour in natural settings, inside protected areas, helps us to determine the motivations behind behaviour leading to human-wildlife conflict outside protected areas.
Our research comes under three thematic areas:
