Researchers document huge drop in African elephants in a half century

African elephants are Earth's largest land animals, remarkable mammals that are very intelligent and highly social. Researchers unveiled on Monday what they called the most comprehensive assessment of the status of the two African elephant species - the savanna elephant and forest elephant - using data on population surveys conducted at 475 sites in 37 countries from 1964 through 2016. We likely will lose more populations going forward," said George Wittemyer, a Colorado State University professor of wildlife conservation and chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, who helped lead the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We have lost a number of elephant populations across many countries, but the northern Sahel region of Africa - for example in Mali, Chad and Nigeria - has been particularly hard hit. The study did not track a continent-wide population tally because the various surveys employed different methodologies over different time frames to estimate local elephant population density, making a unified head count impossible.