After a long and restless month of travel, I spent 2 weeks in the Maasai Mara meeting with conservancy partners to review progress on project related activities. During this time, we conducted several days of surveys along standardized transects, recording all wildlife greater than 15 kg in body mass (approximately the size of a Thomson’s gazelle or larger) observed within 500 m of the vehicle. Using this approach, my team is generating the first reliable estimate of large herbivore abundance and distribution at the conservancy level, providing critical information to support evidence-based management and conservation decisions.

The rain arrived a bit earlier than usual this year – a welcome surprise for many – but making travel across the landscape quite challenging. It is a season of renewal in the Mara, with many newborn hyenas, elephant, wildebeest, and giraffe beginning life amid the flush of lush green vegetation. A wonderful time to be in Kenya, working alongside inspiring partners who are deeply committed to conserving this remarkable landscape for future generations.

The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wildlife Animals (CMS) and the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration (GIUM) published a new atlas today featuring the migration of wildebeest across the Greater Mara Ecosystem in Kenya. This latest atlas features data I have been collecting with partners since 2010, highlighting the severe loss and restriction of habitats available to wildebeest. You can view the atlas here and following the “What’s New” link in purple, or click on the image below.

The wildebeest atlas is 1 of 48 ungulate (hoofed mammal) migrations that have been mapped globally. Many others remain to be mapped. All atlases include a detailed fact sheet, with details of their threats. In this case, the atlas paints a grim picture of a once vibrant migration that has been lost over the past decade due to increasing threats from humans, replacement by livestock, and fencing.

The goal of GIUM is to put all known migrations (historic and contemporary) on a map, with as much detail as possible, so that decision-makers have the relevant information at their fingertips to make informed decisions about the potential impacts from land-use decisions. The effort is championed by a skilled team of scientists and cartographers from the University of Wyoming.

Over 100,000 wildebeest once migrated across this ecosystem in southern Kenya. We now estimate that the total area of the migration footprint has been reduced by nearly 90% since 2020. The good news is that fences can be removed far easier that permanent structures, if political will exists to do so.

Across ecosystems globally, my research is intently focused on providing practical recommendations with partners to maximize conservation outcomes. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the Greater Mara Ecosystem in Kenya, where fencing has dramatically altered the landscape and negatively impacted the ability of wildlife (and pastoralists) to move and access seasonally variable resources.

In 2024, we published a manuscript in Ecological Applications – Predicting the Impact of Targeted Fence Removal on Connectivity in a Migratory Ecosystem. Our analysis, led by PhD student Imogen Schwandner at Humbodlt University in Berlin (formerly a MS student at the University of Glasgow), recognizes that we are unlikely to be able to conserve every piece of land for conservation. Quite simply, there are far too many competing interests and far too little funding to do so. As a result, analyses that target areas that have the greatest conservation impact are incredibly useful, providing information to local decision makers on where to allocate limited resources.

Our analyses compares historic wildebeest movements (2010-2013) with those of contemporary (2017-2021) wildebeest. We overlaid mapped fences across the ecosystem, creating a database of landscape features (called Landscape Dynamics), so that different scenarios can be quantitatively evaluated. Our results show that Corridor I could lead to >40% improvement in connectivity, with costs that are equal to or better than the establishment of corridors in other areas. 

Accompanying our recent publication on the Conservation Status of Giraffe, National Geographic published a short article to profile the good news that there are approximately 117,173 giraffe in the wild in Africa today, a 20% increase from 2015 estimates. Part of the reason for the increase is simply due to improved survey and analytical techniques (such as Crego et al. 2020), refining our estimates with better quality data. In other cases, the observed increases are due directly to conservation efforts across the species ranges, including species translocations led by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation.

Northern giraffe (Critically Endangered) remain the most threatened of all the giraffe species, with roughly 5,900 individuals remaining, scattered across isolated pockets in North Africa. Reticulated giraffe (Endangered) are the second least-populous, with roughly 16,000 individuals. Roughly 45,000 Masai giraffe (Endangered) remain, a significant increase from 2015, while southern giraffe (~48,000 individuals) have remained relatively stable.

Congratulations to Michael Brown, Julian Fennessy and all co-authors for this publication and their efforts to raise the profile of giraffe and take action with local organizations and officials to work towards reversing the trends of the past. The National Geographic article can be found online here.

If you have animal movement data and want to free your inner coder, check out our latest paper in Remote Sensing entitled “Enhancing Animal Movement Analyses: Spatiotemporal Matching of Animal Positions with Remotely Sensed Data Using Google Earth Engine and R” to dynamically extract a suite of remote sensing datasets at individual GPS point observations. Importantly, the code shows you how to match the spatio-temporal dynamics of your datasets. The manuscript is open access, with detailed code on how to conduct the analysis on your own. Congratulations to SCBI post-doctoral researcher Ramiro Crego, University of Glasgow graduate student Majaliwa Masolele, and SCBI ecologist Grant Connette for this great contribution.

Just published in Science, the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration (GIUM) is a collaboration of 92 international scientists and conservationists from more than 25 countries to map out a future for migratory ungulates. Congratulations to all involved, especially the scientific leads. Further details, including a Migration Viewer , can be found at https://www.cms.int/gium. Even cooler, take a look at the YouTube video. Looking forward to seeing how this initiative and all the collaborators involved grow over time. A first of its kind!

Incredibly proud of this one. Congratulations to Ramiro Crego for pushing this publication forward, which uses least-cost paths and circuit theory to identify key linkage zones across the Laikipia plateau for African elephant, reticulated giraffe, plains zebra, and Grevy’s zebra. It’s hoped that results from this research will prove useful for wildlife managers across the region, detailing priority areas that are necessary to maintain habitat connectivity for these mega-herbivores. For more details, see our publication in Landscape Ecology.

Psyched to have been part of this virtual lecture series with fellow Smithsonian Movement of Life scientists Matt Ogburn and Autumn-Lynn Harrison and the team from NASA, including Jeffrey Masek, Bridget Seegers, and Lesley Ott. Super cool event with great and accomplished people. Plus, the discussion was moderated by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, an accomplished marine biologist in her own right with over 200 days in space. Thank you Jessica. Thanks also to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum for organizing and profiling this event, with many involved behind the scenes and over many months to make this happen. A good and lively discussion, I think. If you weren’t able to tune in live, the taped broadcast is available on YouTube. Go Team!