Elephants Not in the Room: Systematic Review Shows Major Geographic Publication Bias in African Elephant Ecological Research

Abstract

African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) are a keystone species in African ecosystems. As a result of increasing anthropogenic pressure, elephant populations have declined significantly in the last two centuries. Research on a broad sample of these populations is necessary to inform management strategies over a range of environmental and socio-political conditions. In order to evaluate the current state of literature that is informing evidence-based management and conservation of elephants, we systematically reviewed all research published on the ecology of African elephants from the last 20 years (492 publications). We contrasted the geographic distribution of published research against the 2016 IUCN elephant census. We found several statistically significant biases in the geographic distribution of elephant research. South Africa has 4.54% of the total elephant population and accounted for 28.28% of all research publications. Kenya has 5.49% the total elephant population but accounts for 20.6% of the research. Conversely, Botswana has 31.68% of the total elephant population but accounts for only 9.29% of the research and Zimbabwe has 19.89% of the total elephant population with only 10.50% of research. We also found that 41.85% of areas with ~60,100 elephants have not had any research published on their populations in the last 20 years. This publication imbalance may encourage management strategies that are overly dependent on misrepresentative information from a small subset of the elephant population. We recommend that (1) marginalised areas with large elephant populations (e.g., Botswana and Zimbabwe) should receive higher priority for future research, (2) new research and proposals should design theoretical frameworks to account for and overcome the present biases, and (3) local community-based management approaches should be prioritised and amplified in order to overcome the barriers to conducting research in priority areas.