Mapping water for elephants
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In dry ecosystems, wildlife often depend on seasonal pools of water for drinking, cooling off, and accessing good food. These small, rain-fed water resources are critically vulnerable to climate change, especially in southern Africa.
In this project, we establish contemporary, sub-seasonal, high resolution water maps of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) in southern Africa from 2019-2025. We show that African savanna elephant depend on small pools in the wet season, but that current maps of global surface water omit these resources entirely. We also found that these ephemeral waterholes are largely rainfed with significant wet season peaks, but that they failed to fill in 2024 following two years of drought. In a drying ecosystem home to the world’s largest population of African savanna elephant, our novel maps and findings are crucial for conservation management under climate change. |
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USE these methods or data
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READ about this project
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This project has been a collaboration between Cornell University and WWF-US, building on previous work at Duke University (Tracking a blue wave of ephemeral water across arid southern Africa) . All surface water raster data are hosted on HydroShare. Code for the seasonal fill analysis and elephant water use case study are shared on GitHub. Code to produce water maps was written using Google Earth Engine. Individual savanna elephant GPS collar data are sensitive due to poaching concerns and cannot be provided publicly. |
An elephant raises its trunk to smell the air, Kruger National Park, South Africa
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