This study uses the African Elephant Database (AED) to answer a key conservation question: were African elephant populations in eastern and southern Africa increasing or decreasing in the late 1990s? Because elephant data come from many sources with uneven quality—ranging from rigorous aerial counts to rough guesses—simple comparisons of continent-wide totals can be misleading. Changes in survey methods, unsurveyed range, out-of-date estimates, and shifting survey boundaries can all create false signals of increase or decline.
To reduce this noise, the authors selected 51 sites (13 in eastern Africa and 38 in southern Africa) where elephant surveys were repeated using comparable methods and similar areas between roughly 1994–1998 and 1998–2002. Most were systematic aerial surveys in and around major protected areas. These sites cover only about 11% of Africa’s elephant range, but they hold roughly 77% of the continent’s “definite and probable” elephants reported in the 2002 African Elephant Status Report.
Across all selected sites, elephant numbers rose from 282,895 to 353,687—an increase of about 70,800 elephants, or an estimated 4.5% per year (95% CI: 2.2–6.6%). Southern Africa showed a clear, statistically significant increase of about 5.4% annually, driven largely by strong growth in well-managed populations such as northern Botswana and parts of Zimbabwe. Eastern Africa also showed a likely increase (about 3% per year), though the result was not statistically conclusive.
The authors stress that these gains apply to surveyed sites only—mostly well-protected parks and reserves—and do not speak for West or Central Africa, where data remain sparse. Some individual areas still declined, and immigration into protected sites may explain part of the growth. Even so, the analysis provides rare, statistically supported evidence that many savannah elephant populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing in the late 1990s, highlighting the value of strong protection, monitoring, and habitat conservation.
