Minerals are an essential component of an elephant's diet     Image copyright © by Simon Hedges 2008                           

Tools
for
Asian
Elephant Conservation

Elephant News Service

If you would like to keep up to date with current issues in elephant conservation as reported by the press, as well learn of relevant scientific publications, please subscribe to the free Asian Elephant News Listserv, an initiative of Save the Elephants. There is also an African Elephant news listserv.

Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants

Members of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group (AsESG) work closely with the CITES Programme for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE).

MIKE is a system to monitor elephant population trends and the illegal killing of elephants at selected sites in Africa (45 sites in 27 Range States) and Asia (15 sites in 11 Range States). MIKE is not in itself an anti-poaching operation to stop the illegal killing of elephants, although information generated by MIKE may guide such efforts.

The following practical manuals and minimum standards documents are available:

MIKE Aerial Survey Standards

MIKE Dung Survey Standards. Members of the AsESG have contributed to the production of the Dung Survey Standards for the MIKE Programme, which is the standard ‘how to’ manual for dung-based elephant survey methods including both dung count based and fecal DNA based capture–recapture methods.

African Elephant resources of interest

A number of resources of relevance to Asian Elephant conservation can also be found on the website of the IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group.