Alan E. Gelfand

Primary Theme: Energy & Environment

Poaching is rapidly wiping out African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) from most of their historical range, leaving vast areas of elephant-free tropical forest. Elephants are ecological engineers that create and maintain forest habitat; the reduction of elephant populations will result in dramatic ecological changes in central African forests, including altered species composition, increased stem densities of small trees and lower abundance of large trees. This unintended experiment may help resolve whether differences between central African and neotropical forests are due to the destruction of megafauna in the neotropics thousands of years ago.