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Integrated Environmental & Coastal Management Terrestrial Ecology Research Unit

The Addo elephants

Staff and students of NMMU’s Terrestrial Ecology Research Unit have been undertaking research on the world-famous Addo elephants for over a decade, and this work is making groundbreaking contributions to the issue of conservation of biodiversity, as well as providing new insights into elephant biology. The focus has been on the elephants as well as the impact on their habitat. In order to study the elephants at an unprecedented detail, every animal is known and the project has records of births and deaths for each elephant back to 1931 – probably the most comprehensively known population of large wild animals in the world.
Research on their impacts has shown that elephants influence every aspect of biodiversity that has been investigated – mostly in a negative fashion. This population represents an important opportunity for the NMMU to train top-quality students and produce valuable research.
   

Heritage Book funding

The late Jack Skead wrote two companion volumes on the topic - Historical Mammal Incidence in the Cape Province. Volume 1 which dealt with the Western and Northern Cape, and Volume 2, which dealt with the eastern half of the Cape Province, including the Ciskei, Transkei and East Griqualand. The NMMU Trust contributed towards the subsequent revision and re-publication of Volume 2, titled Historical Incidence of Large Land Mammals in the Broader Eastern Cape.

The book is being distributed free of charge to education, research and conservation management organisations and institutions in the Eastern Cape and beyond. The book was co-edited by André Boshoff and Graham Kerley, ecologists at the Centre for African Conservation Ecology at NMMU as well as Peter Lloyd, a mammalogist with the Western Cape Nature Conservation Board, Cape Town .
   
 
© Copyright NMMU Trust, 2007