The science post of the weekend with Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief ofEpsiloon.
and good news to announce to you, which can be good in this rather serious news that we are experiencing at the moment.
franceinfo: Giraffes, which are in the category of vulnerable species, are back. Are their populations recovering?
Mathilde Fontez: Yes, they remain for the moment classified in the category of vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. But the inventory of their population which has just been published shows an increase in their number. This iconic African species is getting better.
There are 117,000 giraffes in the wild today. That is 20% more than during the last census, in 2015.
Are the conservation programs starting to work?
Partly yes, according to the researchers’ analysis. Giraffes are threatened by poaching, but above all by the fragmentation of their habitat. The creation of reserves, notably in Niger, Chad or Uganda, has enabled populations to regain space.
Northern giraffes in particular, a population that lives in central and western Africa, as well as Uganda and parts of Kenya, were considered the most endangered species. We can now see that they are growing again: the population has increased from 4,780 in 2015 to 5,900 today.
But it is also the counting techniques that have improved.
Do we have better data today?
Yes, the giraffe is very shy: it is difficult to spot and count. Especially since it extends over all of sub-Saharan Africa, in a multitude of small populations, isolated from each other. It was even recently discovered that there are not one, but four species of giraffe – in 2016 alone, genetic studies showed this.
Until then, most counts were made by plane. But ecologists have implemented other techniques, based on photographic surveys. Computer programs are now used that automatically analyze images and recognize individuals based on their spots. In Kenya, this would explain the explosion in the number of giraffes detected: there are 16,000 today: more than double what was counted in 2015.
Are the giraffes saved?
For specialists, they remain in danger. In particular because of global warming which increases the pressure on populations. We are far from having found the populations of giraffes that extended in Africa a few hundred years ago: there were then a million. But these figures give hope: they show that the largest animal in the world can bounce back when its living conditions improve.