Poaching decimated African elephant populations from ~ 1.3 million to 500,000 individuals in the eight years between 1979 and 1987.

This prompted the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to list the African elephant as endangered in 1989.  However, the illegal ivory trade has once again increased to its highest levels in history.  Much of this demand is being driven by the growing economy in China and the prestige associated with owning ivory in that nation.

Pressure by some nations to lift the ivory trade ban has also persisted, while other nations have argued this would exacerbate poaching continent-wide.

Forest elephants add another challenge. They are currently being slaughtered across central Africa because logging, road building and the bushmeat trade have recently made elephants more vulnerable to poaching. However, poaching in forests cannot be monitored by aerial surveys as in savanna habitat.

To address these problems, we developed a genetic method to track the geographic origin of poached ivory.

Identify poaching hot spots and potential trade routes by determining the geographic origin of contraband ivory seized by wildlife authorities.

We are now collaborating with the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime and the Lusaka Agreement Task Force (LATF), using these methods to determine the geographic composition of major ivory seizures moving from Africa to the Far East . We are striving to improve the accuracy of predictions by filling the remaining gaps in the gene frequency map used to determine elephant origin. DNA extracted from feces provides a non-invasive method of rapidly acquiring these reference data samples from across Africa .

Wildlife authorities initially suspected that this ivory came from multiple locations across forest and savanna Africa .  However, our results showed that the ivory was entirely from savanna elephants, originating from a narrow E-W band of southern Africa, centered on Zambia (Figure 4).  This enabled law enforcement to focus their investigation to a smaller area and fewer trade routes, and led to changes within the Zambian government that significantly improved their anti-poaching efforts. 

Our approach is providing reliable information on where ivory poaching is most concentrated in Africa .  Such information tells authorities where greater enforcement efforts are needed and helps to identify trade routes used to move ivory inside and outside Africa . Results also create accountability that forces nations to be more responsive to poaching in their country.  

Information gathered from these analyses, and associated increases in seizure rates, should enable international authorities to more effectively track the consequences of future trade decisions.

Traffic in forest elephant ivory can also be used to indicate hotspots in the burgeoning bushmeat trade across central Africa . These methods may be among the only reliable means to monitor trade in forest ivory and bushmeat because poached carcasses are difficult to detect in dense forests.

Additional uses include:

Detecting whether declared government ivory stockpiles are being sold off and illegally replenished.

Detection of illegally traded tusks from other countries in sanctioned ivory sales.

The statistical methods described here are implemented in the software package SCAT (Smoothed and Continuous Assignment Tests), which can be accessed at: