Angolan giraffe (Giraffa giraffa angolensis) are a subspecies of southern giraffe that are listed by the IUCN Red List as a species of Least Concern. Angolan giraffe populations, however, were decimiated during the liberation struggle and civil war in Angola that ended in the early 2000s.

In 2022, I traveled with a team from the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF) and African Parks to Iona National Park in Angola. The goal of the mission was to evaluate habitat across Iona NP for potential giraffe reintroduction efforts aimed to repopulate areas where Angolan giraffe once persisted.

After multiple days of driving across extremely dry areas in Angola, we arrived in Iona. Habitat was visually similar to habitat in northern Namibia where populations of Angolan giraffe were thriving. In 2023, the GCF team began reintroducing Angolan giraffe to Iona National Park with African Parks and Angolan government authorities.

Today, we published an article in Restoration Ecology that predicts the quality and extent of suitable habitat for Angolan giraffe across Iona National Park. The model was parameterized using giraffe occurrence data from Namibia and validated with GPS tracking data from the translocated giraffe. Our framework includes a coded workflow that others can use to evaluate habitat suitability in potential translocation areas for their own target species. This study underscores the value of leveraging data to proactively identify suitable habitat prior to initiating animal translocations, activities which can be challenging and prohibitively expensive.

Congratulations to Ramiro Crego and team for pushing these efforts forward. I’m thrilled to be involved. Congrats also to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation for being a small organization with BIG impact.

The paper can be founder here as an open access pre-print at Restoration Ecology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec.70243), inclusive of code to recreate the analysis.