EceOzen/world-elephant-day

Real-time IUCN, Movebank & ERA5 data combined to analyze African elephant conservation status and movement ecology # 🐘 World Elephant Day: Threat, Movement & Climate A one-day data exploration combining three real, independent APIs to ask: *what does the current status of African elephants actually look like, at the level of individual animals and real GPS tracks — not just headline population numbers?* Built as a break from paper-writing on 12 August 2026 (World Elephant Day). What started as a quick population-trend chart turned into a small end-to-end pipeline: conservation status → real movement telemetry → climate reanalysis, joined on space and time. ## What's in here - **Conservation status** — live IUCN Red List API v4 queries for both African elephant species (*Loxodonta africana*, *Loxodonta cyclotis*), including Red List category, full threat breakdown with severity scores, and range-country lists - **Real movement data** — 2.93 million GPS fixes from 15 collared elephants (Movebank study *"African Elephants in Etosha National Park"*, Wayne Getz, PI), 2008–2014, pulled via the Movebank REST API - **Climate cross-analysis** — ERA5 monthly reanalysis (2m temperature, precipitation) for the Etosha bounding box, matched to movement data by month to test whether rainfall predicts elephant movement ## Key findings - Both African elephant species are formally threatened but via **different mechanisms**: *L. africana* (savanna) is Endangered, driven mainly by habitat conversion; *L. cyclotis* (forest) was upgraded to **Critically Endangered in January 2026**, driven by poaching for the ivory trade ("Rapid Declines" severity, international trade flagged) - Movement tracks a rainfall signal with a **~2-month lag** (r = 0.39 at lag 2, vs. r = 0.25 at lag 0) — elephants respond to what rain produces (temporary water, fresh forage), not to rain itself - Females moved faster than males at every hour of the day in this dataset, with a shared late-afternoon activity peak - Etosha National Park sits geographically separate from the KAZA transfrontier corridor network (~500–700 k …