14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking at an African Elephant Summit in Botswana on December 3, conservationists announced that, in 2014, they wished to carry out an aerial elephant census in Africa.
More precisely, they plan to use light planes and helicopters to survey countries where fairly large elephant populations live, and determine exactly how many animals inhabit these lands.
Environmentalists working with Elephants Without Borders, i.e. the organization in charge of coordinating the survey, detail that, according to their estimates, the costs for this project will amount to about $8 million (€5.88 million).
The money will be provided by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, via his Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
The business magnate's Foundation has sponsored several other green- and science-oriented projects before, and Paul Allen says that he decided to get behind the Elephant Without Border's initiative after learning that, “courtesy” of poachers, Africa's elephants risk going extinct in the not so distant future.
“This is the bleakest time for the elephants. The statistics on the plight of Africa's elephants is daunting. I'm devoted to supporting new endeavors which provide meaningful science to help reverse this decline and to reduce the variability in elephant population statistics,” Paul Allen explains in a press release, as cited by Mongabay.
The aerial survey of Africa's elephant population is to focus on 13 of the 35 countries known to be inhabited by these animals.
The countries chosen to be included in the census are all believed to be home to over 1,000 elephants, and, taken together, make up about 80-90% of the continent’s entire elephant population.
Conservationists explain that herds in these countries have not been surveyed for quite a while, which is why wildlife researchers are having a hard time saying how many elephants are left in the world.
Presently, it is estimated that about 500,000 elephants live in Africa. The new survey is expected to help researchers determine whether or not this is indeed the case.