Amboseli Elephant Research Project

The Amboseli Elephant Research Project is a long-term research project on the ethology of the African elephant, operated by the nonprofit Amboseli Trust for Elephants. The project studies the elephant's social behavior, age structure and population dynamics.[1] It is the longest running study of elephant behavior in the wild,[2] and has gathered data on life histories and association patterns for more than 1700 individual elephants.[3]

The research project was initiated in 1972 by Cynthia Moss and Harvey Croze in Amboseli National Park in the south of Kenya. Relatively few poachers have been active in Amboseli Park's approximately 390 km² area. This is especially due to the Maasai people, and the constant presence of tourists and researchers. Thus, Amboseli is one of the few regions in Africa where the age structure of elephants has remained undistorted. The area is monitored by game wardens and scientists throughout the year.

The subjects of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, mostly notably the elephant matriarch Echo, have been described at length in documentaries on PBS and Animal Planet.[4][5]

References
  1. "Amboseli & Us: Project History". Amboseli Trust for Elephants. Archived from the original on February 3, 2014. Retrieved January 26, 2014.
  2. Jane E. Brody (December 20, 1994). "Border Path Is Deadly for 3 Elephants". The New York Times. Retrieved January 26, 2014.
  3. Karen McComb; Cynthia Moss; Sarah M. Durant; Lucy Baker; Soila Sayialel (April 20, 2001). "Matriarchs as Repositories of Social Knowledge in African Elephants" (PDF). Science. 292 (5516): 491–494. doi:10.1126/science.1057895. PMID 11313492.
  4. Mike Birkhead (2010). "Echo: An Elephant to Remember". PBS.
  5. Rupi Mangat (March 17, 2008). "Amboseli - Dim Future for the Elephants". The East African.

Further reading
  • The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal. Moss, Croze, Lee. 2011. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226542232
  • Moss, C. J. (2001). "The demography of an African elephant (Loxodonta africana) population in Amboseli, Kenya". Journal of Zoology. 255 (2): 145–156. doi:10.1017/S0952836901001212.
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