Elephant Atlas

In 2013, The Great Elephant embarked on a journey to understand the alarming decline of elephant populations across Africa. National parks and wildlife staff in 18 countries with support from seven NGOs coordinated by Vulcan to carry out the most extensive pan continental elephant survey since the 1970’s.

The efforts resulted in an unprecedented store of elephant data. In 2016, the GEC partnered with The Office for Creative Research, asking us to tell the many stories of this data. Using a website as our medium, we created visualization tools to show what effects of poaching and the ivory trade have on elephant populations, and how government policies have a direct hand in affecting change. More importantly, we wanted to show what tangible actions and effects people currently have in helping improve the existing situation. These visualization tools were built for use by the general public as well as policy makers with the hope that they could best situate their actions in the larger story of conservation. Deeper interactives were balanced with accessible and educational tools to allow different types of engagement with the data.

The results of our work were unveiled with Vulcan and the Great Elephant Census at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii in late summer 2016. We were thrilled to have been part of this multinational effort! Feel free to explore the data on the Elephant Atlas website.