The Kavango-Zambezi transboundary conservation area was created to protect wildlife, particularly elephants, from poaching. It has fully succeeded in doing so, as it now has 250,000 elephants, or more than half of the total population of these pachyderms on the continent, estimated at 415,000 according to the WWF. At the same time, human-elephant conflicts have also increased. Re-establishing migration corridors would solve, at least in part, this problem. To this end, using AI, an aerial survey will be conducted to determine the number of elephants, animal corridors and human settlements around conservation areas in its member states.

Located in southern Africa, the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) was inaugurated in March 2012. It covers 520,0000 km2 across the borders of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbawe. Centered on the Okavango and Zambezi river basins, it has more than a dozen national parks, a variety of other reserves and the famous Victoria Falls.

Unfortunately, human-elephant conflicts are on the rise. More than 2 million people live in less than a quarter of the area of the ZAKA zone. In order to survive, villagers encroach on forest areas to grow crops, while elephants, which are becoming more numerous, devastate crops and even homes, and even attack humans. Climate change and drought are exacerbating these conflicts.

Establishing or re-establishing migration corridors

African elephants usually migrate at the arrival of the dry season in June to find their food. The migratory routes they used to take are now hindered by obstacles: barriers, bridges, roads… To curb the overpopulation of elephants, especially in the Chobe National Park in Botswana, the solution would be to move the elephants to the Kafue National Park in Zambia and Luiana National Park in Angola, where there are far fewer of them.

This is why the Botswana and Angolan governments launched an initiative in 2020 to create passages for elephants to move from northern Botswana to southern Angola.

Determining elephant numbers, animal corridors, and human settlements around Kaza conservation areas with AI

The Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Conservation Area will spend more than $3 million on the study, which will be conducted using AI-enabled cameras attached to the underside of aircraft. A week-long training workshop to train and select the observers who will participate was held in the town of Kasane, Botswana.

Experts from the five KAZA member states are planning the best strategies and techniques for implementing the aerial survey.

Howard Frederick, an ecologist, states:

“We hope to use new technology to replace the human eye and get the same data, so that we can be more consistent and reduce the training time needed to conduct the surveys. We are taking advantage of the fact that some of these cameras have a high enough resolution to allow us to see not only elephants but also animals the size of warthogs.

He adds:

“So we can use the images to count in the same way we did before but now ci we can review the photos on a larger scale and maybe collect even more data.”

Russell Taylor, WWF Conservation Advisor, concludes:

“The study which will be the first major landscape survey ever undertaken in this part of the world. will provide, first of all, a more reliable estimate of how many elephants we have, but also, more importantly, where they are located; This distribution pattern will allow us to see where they are in relation to human settlement patterns and where there may be opportunities to create corridors to allow elephants to move around and thus try to mitigate as much as possible conflicts with people.”

Translated from Botswana : l’intelligence artificielle pour atténuer le conflit homme-éléphant