Bristol Zoo conservationists fly out to help save giraffes

Conservationists from Bristol Zoological Society are preparing to fly out to Cameroon to help protect Critically Endangered giraffes.

Dr Caspian Johnson and Dr Sam Penny will be training eco-guards working in Bénoué National Park to use special software on smartphones to record illegal activities, such as cattle herding, mining and hunting.

The groundbreaking programme called SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) has been developed by an international partnership of conservationists and is used across the world to improve law enforcement in protected areas.

Dr Johnson said: “It allows national park directors, or Conservators, to map out the patrol effort of their teams and the presence of illegal activity through a standardised process of data collection, analysis and reporting of data collected by eco-guards on patrol.

“Critically, this enables the conservator of the national park to make informed decisions about where to send patrols and how to allocate resources to protect the park’s biodiversity.” 

During their time in Cameroon Dr Johnson and Dr Penny hope to train the >30 eco-guards who must patrol an area of 932 miles, the size of Greater London.

Dr Johnson said: “The number of eco-guards is not enough to cover the whole park but this tool will help them to become more effective. It’s about maximising the resources that are there.”

The data collected will be transferred to computers back at the national park’s headquarters and a picture of the threats to giraffes can then be built up.

It is estimated there are fewer than 2,000 of these giraffes across their range in West and Central Africa, with possibly only around 45 individuals in Bénoué National Park.
The subspecies is now listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Dr Johnson said: “Without proper support, the Kordofan giraffe could disappear from this park, which has already lost African wild dogs, cheetahs and black rhinos. 
“The long-term goal is to reduce illegal activity in the national park and bolster the wildlife population, particularly of the Kordofan giraffes.

“By protecting them we are also protecting the area in which they live and other species in that environment are also protected.”

He said the data collected during the patrols  will also help explain why giraffe numbers have declined in the national park.

Dr Johnson said: “We know they are affected by people, when people move in giraffes move out.

“We suspect it is the direct competition for land with cattle herders who come in huge numbers cutting branches off trees favoured by giraffes as well as the issue of disturbance. 

“Giraffes are sensitive to disturbance. That could affect their breeding successes and there is also general encroachment and mining which prevents giraffes being able to move around like they normally would.

“But it’s only through systematic research over a period of time that we will find out the real reasons.”

While Dr Johnson and Dr Penny are in Cameroon they will also be using drones to try to map where giraffes are found and identify individual animals.

Their three-week field trip to Cameroon has been made possible by funding from the National Geographic Society.

Visitors to Bristol Zoological Society's Wild Place Project can learn more about this work in Cameroon at the giraffe exhibit, where three giraffes live in a recreation of part of Bénoué National Park.

These are reticulated giraffes, which are found across northern and north-eastern Kenya, and in southern Somalia and southern Ethiopia, and are also under threat.
In total the number of giraffes in the wild have fallen from 140,000 to less than 80,000 in just 15 years. There are now fewer giraffes left in the wild than African elephants.

Wild Place Project and Bristol Zoo Gardens are run by Bristol Zoological Society, which is a conservation and education charity and relies on the generous support of the public not only to fund its important work at both zoos, but also its vital education and community outreach programme.