Kenya Wildlife Agents Kill 2 Elephant Poachers : NPR

Kenya Wildlife Agents Kill 2 Elephant Poachers : NPR: "The Kenya Wildlife Service on Friday said its agents shot dead two suspected poachers who they saw shooting at a herd of elephants in one of the country's famous national parks.

This brings the number of poachers shot dead by agents of the wildlife service to five, the most killed in a month, said spokesman Paul Udoto."

Rhino warriors

Wildlife Extra News - Show your support for the rhino warriors: "August 2010: WWF has launched a campaign to raise support and funding for those rangers who put their lives on the line to protect Africa's rhinos. Rhino poaching has increased dramatically over the past year-and-a half, fuelled by demand for horn in Asia for use in traditional medicines.


SHOW YOUR SUPPORT: WWF is asking for the public
to show their support on Make Noise for Rhinos Day
South Africa, proud stronghold of the African black and white rhino with more than 90 per cent of Africa's rhino populations, has been losing at least 20 of the animals per month. In the past four years, about 600 rhinos were poached across the African continent."

Employing participatory surveys to monitor the illegal killing of elephants across diverse land uses in Laikipia–Samburu, Kenya - Kahindi - 2009 - African Journal of Ecology - Wiley Online Library

Employing participatory surveys to monitor the illegal killing of elephants across diverse land uses in Laikipia–Samburu, Kenya - Kahindi - 2009 - African Journal of Ecology - Wiley Online Library: "Levels and trends of illegal killing of elephants are measured by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) programme in sites across Africa and Asia. In the mostly unprotected Laikipia–Samburu MIKE site in northern Kenya, elephant mortality data were collected using both standard law enforcement monitoring procedures, relying on patrolling, and participatory methods involving local communities. Qualitatively, traditional patrolling techniques were more successful in protected areas whereas participatory approaches provided more information outside protected areas, where elephant were most at risk from ivory poachers."

The home range fractal: From random walk to memory-dependent space use

ScienceDirect - Ecological Complexity : The home range fractal: From random walk to memory-dependent space use

We present theoretical developments of the multi-scaled random walk (MRW) model for cognitive map-influenced space use by animals. The extensions include a unified space–time scaling function, and further details with respect to statistical properties of the spatial distribution of a set of locations. Supported by numeric simulations we show how memory effects may open for a complex, multi-scaled and self-organized – i.e., intrinsically driven – habitat utilization pattern with fractal dimensional properties. These properties allow for testing for MRW compliance by using parameters from classic movement models like Brownian motion, correlated random walk and Levy walks as null models.