Elephants move across vast landscapes, guided by water, food and memory. Understanding where they go – and why – is essential to protecting migration routes and reducing conflict where people and elephants share space.
In support of this work, Natural Selection has funded an elephant collaring project in partnership with Elephants for Africa (EFA). The project involved fitting GPS collars to ten adult bull elephants in Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, allowing researchers to follow their movements across both protected wilderness and surrounding human landscapes.
Each collar is equipped with accelerometers that record fine-scale behaviour, including feeding, movement and activity patterns. Over a two-year period, this information will build a detailed picture of how elephants use the landscape—highlighting areas of ecological importance, key migration routes and places where elephants are most likely to encounter people.
Support for the project also includes the careful removal of collars to retrieve stored data, followed by recollaring to ensure long-term monitoring continues. This approach allows EFA to gather meaningful insights while placing elephant welfare at the centre of the work.
The timing of the project is especially important. With the drying of the Boteti River and the reconstruction of sections of the western park boundary fence, the collaring data offers a rare opportunity to compare elephant movements before and after major environmental change. These insights help reveal how elephants adapt to shifting water availability and altered access across the landscape.
At its heart, elephant collaring is about listening—using movement data to better understand needs, pressures and patterns. By following elephants over time, this project helps inform practical decisions that protect migration, reduce conflict and support long-term coexistence between elephants and the people who live alongside them.
