African Forest Elephants Could Be Extinct in 10 Years Due to Poaching

African forest elephants are being poached out of existence with more than 60 percent of them dying because of illegal ivory poaching in the last 10 years, conservationists say.

A new study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and published in PLoS One said the situation for forest elephants is much worse than imagine and measures need to put in place to ensure the survival of these elephants.

"The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction -- potentially within the next decade -- of the forest elephant," says Dr. Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of the lead authors of the study.

"Saving the species requires a coordinated global effort in the countries where elephants occur -- all along the ivory smuggling routes, and at the final destination in the Far East. We don't have much time before elephants are gone," says the other lead author Dr. Fiona Maisels also of WCS.

The paper shows that almost a third of the land where African forest elephants were able to live 10 years ago has become too dangerous for them.

Forest elephants, which often live closer to human populations than the larger savanna elephants, have been particularly hard-hit by ivory poachers. After declines in the elephant population last century, a 1989 international ban on ivory initially led to signs of a resurgence in the animals.

However the heightened demand for ivory in China for traditional medicine has once again led an uptick in elephant slaughters. "We knew it was bad, but their habitat is all under forest coverage, so you can't just go out and do aerial surveys like you can for savanna elephants," Maisels says.

The study examined the largest ever amount of Central African elephant survey data. It includes the work of more than 60 scientists between 2002 and 2011, and an immense effort by national conservation staff who spent 91,600 person-days surveying for elephants in five countries (Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and the Republic of Congo), walking more than 8,000 miles and recording over 11,000 samples for the analysis.