85 Conservation fields, often at night. The two come into conflict—farmers want to protect their livelihoods, homes, and families and elephants want to provide for their herds. King and her team developed a nature-based solution— beehive fences made of wire and treated poles with beehives hanging between them. When elephants strike the fence wires, bees come out buzzing, which scares the elephants away. The team worked with farmers to install them around their fields. Farmers gain further benefits from bees pollinating their crops and selling honey from the hives—and they sleep soundly knowing the African honeybees are active at night. Elephants are afraid of honeybees and avoid them as much as possible because bees swarm and sting them, especially around sensitive areas such as their trunk, eyes, and inside their ears. Today, beehive fences protect farmland in 23 countries. As the project has grown, researchers have used GIS technology and remote sensing—the process of using satellite or other aerial images to monitor characteristics of the earth’s surface— to monitor effectiveness. Simplifying data collection gives program staff not only a better picture of elephant behavior so they can anticipate future problems but also more time to focus efforts on new initiatives. Creating a System within a System Founded in 1993, Save the Elephants has used geospatial technology to track elephant movement across African landscapes for more than two decades. Today, the organization hosts Africa’s largest elephant-tracking database. But as GIS capabilities have evolved, so have the organization’s goals and practices. “When we started working with Esri’s tools, we were putting elephant tracks on a map. Over time, we were able to do advanced analysis to understand migration corridors and use models to see where elephants are most likely to be at certain times of the year,” said Festus Ihwagi, a senior scientist and research manager. Tsavo National Park, Kenya’s largest national park, is home to the country’s largest elephant population, with more than 12,000 residing there. Save the Elephants staff are in constant communication with the farmers who live between the east and west sections of the 8,000-square-mile park. Once beehive fences are built around farms, staff visit to make sure that the fences are working and to spot maintenance issues, and catalog elephant encounters. These data collection processes allow for ongoing research, monitoring, and problem-solving. To monitor farms and fences, a team of GIS officers initially visited farmers with handheld GPS devices and manually recorded information about human-elephant conflicts. That information, which sometimes included hand drawings of elephant movements into and around the farms, was digitized at the office. “There was a lot of work that went into data collection between the handhelds and digitizing and maintaining all the other records that come with that data,” said Gloria Mugo, a GIS officer and remote sensing scientist who joined the Elephants and Bees Project in 2016. The Save the Elephants Bee team (Derick, Emmanuel, Nashon, and Titus) look at a dashboard of data collected from the field. Image by Robyn Brown, courtesy of Save the Elephants.
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