ELEPHANTS COUNT: DESIGNING THE ELEPHANT ATLAS Jane Friedhoff
2 http://www.vulcan.com/ 3 https://elephant-atlas.org/
151 Elephants Count: Designing the Elephant Atlas
1 http://www.greatelephantcensus.com/
Jane Friedhoff
In 2013, The Great Elephant Census 1 embarked on a journey to understand the alarming decline of elephant populations across Africa. Coordinating with national parks and wildlife staff in eighteen countries, the GEC undertook the first panAfrican elephant survey in forty years, creating an enormous wealth of standardized, cleaned, and checked African elephant population data. In 2016, The GEC and Vulcan 2 partnered with us — The Office for Creative Research — to build the Elephant Atlas, 3 which would tell the stories within this data and spur the public to action. Although the the final number of elephants counted (352,000, down 30% in the last seven years alone) told one macro thread of the story, there were many micro-stories hidden in the data: differences in population decline/growth across countries, the intertwining of outside factors like war and climate change, method changes across individual scientific studies, and so on. The challenge would be telling all of these