While the causes of forest elephant endangerment (road building and ivory poaching) may be clear, the question of what to do about it is anything but. Indeed, experts have long debated how to best protect any given species or ecosystem. Early programs often took the single-species conservation approach: They singled out well-known animals—known as flagship species—like pandas and condors, and focused on the specific threats those individual species faced, using a variety of methods, including captive breeding programs to increase population sizes and reintroducing the species to the wild. INFOGRAPHIC 13.3

In some ways, this approach has been a huge success: It has saved gray wolves, eagles, and even brown pelicans from complete decimation. And it’s brought a great deal of attention and funding to conservation efforts. Indeed, the single-species approach is still employed today. Zoos around the world participate in Species Survival Plans, which use careful breeding programs to maximize genetic diversity. Among other things, this includes moving reproductive animals from zoo to zoo to introduce new genes into a breeding program or to minimize inbreeding.

The ultimate goal of these programs is to release animals back into the wild. But the tendency to focus mostly on those species (cute, furry, large) that are photogenic enough to capture the public’s attention means that many, if not most, species in need of help fall through the cracks. (People are more likely to donate money to “Save the panda!” than to “Save the white warty-back pearly mussel!”)

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As long as the main problem facing a species is low population size, reintroduction campaigns can be very effective, but this is insufficient if other threats—such as a degraded habitat or heavy poaching pressure—still exist. Indeed, such campaigns can give a false impression that we are saving many species, when in fact habitat destruction continues to decimate the vital habitat that supports innumerable species. For these reasons, many conservationists advocate an ecosystem conservation approach. This means identifying entire ecosystems—often biodiversity hotspots—that are at risk and taking steps to restore or rehabilitate them. The goal of ecosystem restoration is to return the ecosystems to their original states (or as close to their original states as possible). It may involve reforestation projects, removal of non-native species, restoration of a natural river’s flow patterns, or remediation (the cleanup of pollution); the restoration goal depends on the ecosystem in question.

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In the Costa Rican rain forest, conservation biologist Daniel Janzen has worked for nearly 40 years on restoring the area in and around Guanacaste National Park, forest land that had been converted to pastures and agricultural land. The largest forest restoration project of its kind, Janzen’s plan involved protecting the area from invasive, non-native grasses and fire; replanting trees; and allowing pioneer species to move back into the cleared lands from neighboring forests. Through this process of secondary succession (see Chapter 10), forest plant communities moved back into the area. All told, the project has restored more than 1,000 square kilometers (400 square miles) of pasture land to forest and is now home to an estimated 235,000 species. While restoration programs like this are needed, efforts that prevent destruction in the first place are more likely to protect a greater number of species. The tropical dry forests of Guanacaste will take several hundred years to return to their original mature forest state, and we will never know how many species were lost on their way back to recovery.

Proponents point out that by focusing on the ecosystem as a whole, the entire community benefits—not just the species we knew were endangered but also those that we didn’t know were there. In order to implement an ecosystem approach to conservation, we must know how to identify when an ecosystem is in danger. Ecologists are developing metrics (factors that are measured) to assess ecosystem quality, such as species richness and evenness (see Chapter 10), soil health, water quality, plant community composition, and the abundance of non-native species.

Ecologists often monitor an indicator species—a species that is particularly vulnerable to ecosystem perturbations—to keep track of an ecosystem’s health. A type of ecosystem conservation known as landscape conservation draws on this idea, but instead of following one species, it examines several indicator species in what is known as a landscape species suite. The species are specifically chosen to include a group that, together, uses all the vital areas within the ecosystem. The idea behind this approach is that if you monitor these species together and work to protect them as a group, you will simultaneously be protecting the entire ecosystem in which they reside, including all the species that live around them. INFOGRAPHIC 13.4

Either way, says Evans, the forest elephant is a good bet for conservationists. As a keystone species, it protects and facilitates an endless array of other species. A single-species approach that focuses on preserving the forest elephant will, by necessity, work to restore and protect its habitat and in doing so confer protection on the other species that reside there. A similar strategy proved successful in the Pacific Ocean at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the 1800s, sea otter populations there had fallen drastically because of overhunting (otter pelts were highly valued); this led to an overpopulation of their prey, sea urchins, which feed on kelp. As sea urchin populations grew, the kelp forests were decimated, removing habitat and food for myriad species. After the International Fur Seal Treaty banned the hunting of sea otters in 1911, the otter populations recovered, which brought the sea urchin populations back in check, allowing the kelp to recover and benefitting all the species of the kelp forest.

As for the forest elephant—a highly intelligent mammal with a complex social system—its plight has captured human hearts and thus shone a light on the oft-forgotten African rain forest. Still, to stop the ivory trade from obliterating this particular species, scientists will have to employ a range of tools, some of them much more complicated than dung.

To Sam Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, tracking the ivory trade is a bit like playing a shell game where one must guess which shell the bean is under. By sequencing ivory DNA from elephants all across Africa, Wasser’s Seattle laboratory has mapped the ivory trade—from the slaughtered elephants in Africa to the curio shops in New York and Beijing. What Wasser’s lab has found has astounded nearly everyone involved in elephant conservation. It turns out that countries regarded as veritable success stories—Gabon and Tanzania, for example—where poaching was thought to be all but eradicated, are actually poaching hotspots. “By shipping through all these completely not-intuitive routes,” Wasser says, “the poachers evade detection, because you can’t tell where it comes from.” Moreover, virtually all of the ivory making its way to Wasser’s lab originated in just a handful of places. “We used to think that so much ivory—even before the recent peak, authorities were seizing tons and tons of the stuff every year—we used to think it must be coming from all over the place, because how else could you possibly get that much ivory?” Wasser says. “But the DNA evidence showed that we were way wrong.”

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Wasser’s work falls under the umbrella of conservation genetics—the scientific field that relies on species’ genetics to inform conservation efforts. Through DNA analysis, conservation biologists can determine the amount of genetic diversity within a population, or the kinship between separate groups—that is, whether they are part of one extended population or represent distinct populations that don’t interbreed—or even whether a given population is part of an endangered species. INFOGRAPHIC 13.5

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For example, IUCN scientists are analyzing anatomical and genetic data in order to determine whether the forest elephant and the savanna elephant of Africa are two different species. (Currently they are considered two distinct subspecies: Loxodonta africana cyclotis [forest elephant] and Loxodonta africana africana [savanna elephant].) The forest elephant is several feet shorter than the latter, on average (2.5 meters [8 feet] versus 4 meters [12 feet] for full-grown males); eats much more fruit; and has straighter, slimmer tusks and smoother skin that allow it to move easily through dense forests. The savanna elephant, on the other hand, being much larger and literally rougher around the edges, prefers wide-open grasslands. The two had been grouped together—by poachers, laypeople, and conservationists alike—for centuries. But it turns out they have no more genetic overlap than the Indian elephant and the nowextinct woolly mammoth from which it evolved.

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One new technology just getting off the ground is the use of conservation drones (unmanned aerial vehicles). Drones are being used for research (to census difficult-to-track populations) and for conservation efforts (to identify poachers or even scare elephants away from villages). Simply the presence of drones has been known to scare poachers away.