Ivory Coast without ivory: Massive extinction of African forest elephants in Cote d'Ivoire.

ABSTRACT: In pre-colonial and colonial times Côte d'Ivoire probably hosted one of the largest elephant populations in West Africa, resulting in the country's name Côte d'Ivoire (in English Ivory Coast) by French settlers. Numbers declined and by the early 90s it was estimated that the total number of both savannah and forest elephants had reached 63 to 360 elephants in the entire country. Here we present updated information on the distribution and conservation status of forest elephant in Côte d'Ivoire based on multiple sources-dung counts on line transects, records of human-elephant conflict, media reports, sign and interview surveys-obtained during the period 2011-2017. We used Pearson correlation to determine the correlation between the presence of forest elephant and site variables (size of the

SUBMITTER: Kouakou JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7556483 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature