Survey & Monitoring

My survey and monitoring work has run the gamut from developing new methods, to teaching at training sessions, to designing and implementing surveys, to participating in planning and priority setting exercises. It all started in 1995-6, when I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in at the headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx. One day WCS field researchers Jefferson Hall and Lee White walked in and asked for help analyzing survey data they had collected on eastern lowland gorilla abundance in the Kahuzi Biega region of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. More precisely, they wanted to know if I could write a computer program that would produce bootstrap confidence intervals for their abundance estimates. For the next decade most of my work focused on wildlife survey and monitoring. I initially spent three months at Nouabale Ndoki National Park comparing formal transects to less formal recce walks with Lee, Fiona “Boo” Maisels, and Steve Blake. But for the following four years I was based out of the Station d’Etude de Gorille et Chimpanzee, in Lope Reserve (now National Park).

Between 1997 and 2000, Lee and I did three-month training workshops at protected areas in Gabon, Cameroon, and Republic of Congo, each session training about twenty African wildlife personnel in field methods, survey design, data analysis, and more general professional skills (e.g. computer use). I also designed new field and analytical methods for wildlife survey (e.g. with former students Hjalmar Kuehl and Angelique Todd), provided survey, collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund to design, implement, and analyze surveys in the Minkebe and Gamba areas, and provided survey design and analysis advice to countless researchers, conservationists, and organizations. For example, I consulted with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on the establishment of the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants program and even suggested the “MIKE” acronym at an experts meeting in Nairobi. I also participated in numerous international planning and priority setting meetings involving apes, elephants, and protected areas. I am one of the few (only?) people to have sat on IUCN Specialists Groups for both apes and elephants.

Whale Surveys

In the summer of 1996, I assisted then graduate student Howard Rosenbaum in establishing a humpback whale research and conservation program in Bai d’Antongil, Madagascar, personally taking more than one hundred biopsy dart samples with a crossbow. A few months later, while doing a wildlife survey and monitoring training session in coastal Gabon with Lee White, I saw a whale skull bleaching in the sun at the headquarters of Petit Loango Reserve in Sette Cama. I asked around in the Wildlife Department but nobody knew more than that whale carcasses occasionally washed up on the beach. When I did some online research, I found that Gabon’s second largest city, Port Gentil, had been the main whaling port on Africa’s Atlantic Coast, probably because of massive plankton blooms caused by upwelling where the Equatorial Countercurrent hits the African coast that supported an entire food chain from zooplankton on up through humpback, fin, sei, sperm, and killer whales. At its peak, the Port Gentil whale fishery killed thousands of whales every year, mostly humpbacks. But I couldn’t find any information after whaling shut down in the early 1960’s, when the whale population became too depleted for whaling to be profitable.

So, I organized an aerial survey of the Gabonese coast with WCS colleagues Lee White and Mike Fay and Guy Phillipe Sounguet, President of the local turtle conservation NGO Aventure Sans Frontiere (ASF). We saw large numbers of humpbacks along the coast and also videoed whales swimming within a few tens of meters from an oil spill emanating from an oil rig operated by now defunct French oil giant Elf. To my knowledge, this was the first scientific survey of whales in West Africa. The video also prompted Elf to a major cleanup of operations on it’s offshore rigs.

I followed this with two biopsy darting campaigns and a training workshop with ASF. These initial pilot studies grew into a full-blown whale research and conservation program run jointly by WCS and the Gabonese Government/ The were also the seeds of a much larger marine conservation program by the Government, which now includes a robust system for enforcing commercial fishing catch limits in Gabonese territorial waters: perhaps the most assertive and technologically advanced program in West African waters.

Western Gorillas Critically Endangered

In 2001, I was hired by the World Bank to design a survey and monitoring system for the new Gabonese National Park System. While I was working on that project, gorilla and chimpanzee carcasses started showing up near human Ebola virus outbreak sites, in several cases acting as the source of human infection. So, I analyzed the survey data I was using for the Park planning process for a signature of Ebola impact on wild apes. I found a strong signal, a positive correlation between distance human outbreak site and both gorilla and chimpanzee density. An expanded analysis with additional data and analytical methods that controlled for confounding factors suggested that about Ebola killed about one third of the world gorilla population. More fine-scaled work with Magdalena Bermejo suggested that at least 5,000 gorillas had died in one area alone. I then led the report that uplisted the western gorilla species to Critically Endangered status on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species due to the rapid rate of population decline.