Nouabalé-Ndoki Project Celebrates Its Two-Year Anniversary!
Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park is one of the last strongholds of the rapidly vanishing African forest elephant. Since the end of 2016, the Elephant Listening Project (ELP), in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Congo, has been managing a grid of 50 acoustic monitoring units covering 1,250 square kilometers of the park and surrounding areas¹. These units record the low-frequency rumbles of forest elephants as well as their roars and vocalizations, and — more disturbingly — the sounds of gunshots from poachers. ELP has used these acoustic recorders before in single, scattered forest clearings, but the Nouabalé-Ndoki project is unprecedented in its scale.
Monkeys hoot in the thick green overstory. A gorilla family forages under the watchful eye of its silverback leader. Forest elephants rumble as they clear a path through the forest, startling a flock of African Grey parrots who take flight in a rush of grey and scarlet feathers. It’s another sweltering day in Nouabalé-Ndoki, and here, in one of the last intact African forest ecosystems, wildlife carries on much as it has for hundreds of years. Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, which celebrated its 25-year anniversary earlier this year², is a lush lowland rainforest in the Republic of Congo that is an oasis for biodiversity, including many endangered species³. Because it is relatively undisturbed by human civilization, Nouabalé-Ndoki is invaluable to conservationists. Exciting research is currently going on in the park, including the Mbeli Bai gorilla study, Goualougo Triangle Ape study, Mondika Gorilla project, and most recently, our very own Elephant Listening Project³.
The Nouabalé-Ndoki project has a threefold mission. First, forest elephants are elusive and not much is known about their behavior and distribution because they spend their time under the impenetrable forest canopy. The project will allow us to understand the movement patterns of forest elephants and poaching events on a “landscape scale”¹. ELP uses these data to create distribution maps which help inform anti-poaching efforts in the park. Since the recording units are scattered throughout the park and nearby logging concession areas, we also will be able to observe how logging activity near the park affects the behavior of the elephants. In particular, we wanted to see if there is a difference in elephant behavior between the concession currently being logged and the concession which was logged a few years ago.
Second, we hope to improve the accuracy of our analytical methods and experiment with new technologies. This project has pioneered new methods for managing acoustic monitoring technology on a large scale.
Third, an essential component of making the Nouabalé-Ndoki project sustainable is training the local Congolese community to deploy acoustic monitoring devices and analyze the sound recordings. Building infrastructure and supporting the grassroots conservation movement will ensure that the elephants will be protected long-term. The Nouabalé-Ndoki project currently employs three dedicated young Congolese researchers — Phael Malonga, Frelcia Bambi, and Poulon Menjo — to collect the memory cards from the recording devices and identify elephant rumbles and gunshots in the sound recordings.
The project will celebrate its 2-year anniversary by the end of 2019. Already we are gaining new insights into the hidden lives of forest elephants and discovering new and exciting ways to use our data. For example, early analysis shows that the elephants are spending more time near the concession where logging occurred several years ago. We hypothesize that the elephants might be attracted to the new plant growth that occurs when older trees are cut down and the forest floor receives more sunlight. We also have been able to create a map showing the concentrations of elephants in the forest at different times of the year and another displaying the areas with the most gunshots recorded.
For ELP, the Nouabalé-Ndoki Project was an ambitious undertaking. No other organization has attempted to monitor elephants using audio recordings at such a grand scale. But the development of audio technology and the commitment of both the Congo and Ithaca teams have made these first two years a success. In the future, we aim to expand our efforts into other areas, increase the size of the grid, and train local researchers to manage their own projects.
And, as always, we are constantly troubleshooting our data collection and analysis process to make it more efficient. The faster we are able to decipher an elephant’s call, the more likely it is that park rangers will be able to protect the elephants from poachers. No one knows what the future holds, but the ELP team is hopeful that the Nouabalé-Ndoki Project is just the beginning.
References:
¹ Temple-Raston, Dina. “Elephants Under Attack Have An Unlikely Ally: Artificial Intelligence.” NPR. NPR, October 25, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/760487476/elephants-under-attack-have-an-unlikely-ally-artificial-intelligence.
² “Nouabale-Ndoki National Park Celebrates 25th Anniversary.” WCS Congo Blog, July 17, 2019. http://wcscongoblog.org/nouabale-ndoki-national-park-celebrates-25th-anniversary/.
³ Arnhem, Eric. “Wild Places Nouabale-Ndoki National Park.” WCS Congo. Accessed December 2, 2019. https://congo.wcs.org/Wild-Places/Nouabale-Ndoki-National-Park.aspx.
Note: Details of the project are based on personal communication with ELP team member and Research Support Specialist Liz Rowland, at ELP headquarters in Ithaca, New York
