Elephants
The largest land mammals in the world, elephants, naturally, have equally large home ranges. African forest elephant can range more than 772 square miles, and Asian elephants can occupy a territory of up to 40 square miles. Not surprisingly, both species are endangered. As the human footprint has grown larger, elephant habitats have shrunk. They have been converted into farmland or deforested as industrial logging and mining spreads, and as roads and settlements encroach deeper into the forest. WCS is working throughout remaining elephant habitats on population monitoring and management and finding novel approaches to reduce human-elephant conflict and ensure the future of these beloved giants.
Featured Species
Forest elephants are much smaller than African bush elephants, with straighter, slimmer tusks. These elephants range throughout western and central Africa, a region rife with political instability and poverty.
Asian elephants were historically found over three and a half
million square miles of their namesake continent, but are now extinct in West Asia, Java, and most of
China, and survive only in isolated pockets scattered across grasslands and
tropical forests in thirteen Asian countries.