Mara Elephant Project USA, Inc.

To combat direct threats to elephants, MEP deploys 84 rangers alongside Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) who work tirelessly. These local men and women are the boots on the ground that prevent poaching, habitat destruction and promote co-existence. MEP has a vast intelligence network that alongside our government partners has been at the center of many arrests and seizures. Our anti-poaching patrols and intelligence gathering raises the opportunity cost for poachers and increases security for not only elephants but other wildlife. MEP’s well-trained rapid response ranger units mitigate conflict between elephants and communities to protect them both.

MEP is developing bespoke technology that has applications for global conservation. The data the MEP LTM collects on the Mara’s elephant population is being analyzed in a bespoke technology called ElephantBook, a system for human-in-the-loop elephant re-identification. Our system can be linked to EarthRanger which helps us efficiently monitor elephant populations and locations from elephant sightings in the wild. MEP also developed Ecoscope, an open-source analysis module for tracking, environmental and conservation data analyses. Ecoscope contains many of the tools needed to get from data collection to a finished report in a quick and easy streamlined workflow. The conservation tech we've developed can be applied globally to combat conservation challenges, and we're sharing it with other organizations.

MEP rangers protect critical habitats in the GME by combatting illegal logging and charcoal production and arresting culprits and confiscating assets. We work closely with partners in the Mau, Loita and Nyakweri forests to effectively use our boots on the ground to deter habitat destruction and monitor illegal activities by collecting them in EarthRanger to show trends over time.

We evaluate forest loss by taking Google Earth Engine’s satellite images and using Esri, a GIS mapping software, to compare the forest year-to-year to show forest loss over time. These actionable outputs are used to develop policy, guide demarcation of the forest and protect boundaries from incursions.

MEP’s vision is to see a stable elephant population co-existing peacefully with people across the GME and in areas where they are struggling to exist in Kenya. There is a limited understanding of the complexity of crop raiding behavior because of the difficulty in obtaining detailed movement data from elephants that actively crop raid. Answering the “why” about crop raiding in elephants varies based on individuals, seasons, opportunity and more. Destruction of crops is economically ruinous to small-scale farmers and leads to harmful human-elephant conflict as elephants often sustain injuries while raiding and it stokes negative human perceptions leading to conservation challenges.

We launched the Co-Existence Farm to determine elephant selection for agricultural crop types in order to trial low-cost solutions to make a traditional subsistence farm elephant friendly.