A Land Overseer from the Village of Ngarange, working with the Ecoexist team and the Seronga Sub Land Board to verify one of the main elephant corridors in the Eastern Okavango Panhandle.
Dr. Anna Songhurst, working with Land Overseers and the Seronga Sub Land Board to verify the 9km length of elephant corridors at one of 13 main locations in the Eastern Okavango Panhandle.
Our team has been busy with innovative and ground-breaking work to identify, demarcate, and protect elephant movement pathways! Here are a couple photos from last week–Land Overseers from each village in the Eastern Okavango Panhandle worked closely with Dr. Anna Catherine Songhurst and leaders of the Seronga Sub Land Board to verify elephant corridor locations and edges. These main corridors (13 in all) will soon be marked with signs and set aside for protection from agricultural fields and settlements. This land use planning process has been both scientific and participatory from the beginning. Dr. Songhurst has spent years tracking and monitoring elephant movements in the Panhandle to see where herds move most frequently and in the biggest numbers. At the same time, she has communicated regularly with elders and villagers to gather their own, on-the-ground understanding of elephant movements. More recently her work with the Ecoexist team has involved taking the collective scientific and traditional knowledge to the government to ensure land use policy in Botswana respects the need to protect elephant corridors from human settlements while also protecting farmers and their fields from the main elephant “highways”!