Richard (right) with two staff members of Kakum National Park.

Richard Barnes

Dr. Richard Barnes was one of ELP's founding members. He organized and participated in ELP's work in Kakum National Park. He is a conservationist affiliated to Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and the University of California, San Diego. He has worked on elephants and primates throughout Africa, and refined the technique of making systematic counts of elephant dung piles to chronicle forest elephants' presence and abundance.

Steve (left) with Mya and Andrea at the field camp in Dzanga National Park..

Steve Gulick

Steve was ELP's first engineer, and accompanied us to the field in 2000. He is now an expert in remote sensing for wildlife protection, and you can find him heading up his own organization, Wildland Security here.

Eric Spaulding

Eric worked for ELP from 2001-2005 as an engineer and researcher. For the 2002 Dzanga expedition, he deployed an array of BRP's TARU units to collect time-synchronized elephant vocalizations. He created and deployed the 'Musthmaster' digital camera array system to capture elephant locations within the Dzanga Bai, and later built a custom database for the team's analysis. Eric is currently working on BRP's automatic-detection buoy system, but has many fond memories of Dzanga.

Bruce (center) and Nik (right) with Peter, setting out for field work.

Bruce Thompson and Nik Batruch

Bruce is a professor of physics at Ithaca College. He's also the father of one of ELP's founding members, Mya Thompson. He has had an active interest in ELP ever since Mya started here. Nik was one of Bruce's students when the two of them went with Peter to Gabon in 2007 and provided the expertise for recording seismic activity for the project on the effect of oil exploration on elephant activity (see more here). Nik has now moved on to a career in sound engineering.

Edward Wiafe

Edward has been working in Kakum National Park, Ghana (one of ELP’s study sites) since 2003. He took a leave of absence to study for an M.Sc. at Freiburg University, Germany. As part of this, he joined us for a summer internship in 2007. He is now back in Kakum NP, working as a Law Enforcement and Protection Officer. He is conducting reseach for his PhD (with Cape Coast University) on the ecology of a primate species in Kakum Conservation Area. ELP is very happy to have Edward as a colleague: we hope to have a long and fruitful relationship with him.

©Melissa Groo

Andrea Turkalo with the Ba'Aka team.

Dzanga Ba'Aka Team

A team of Ba'Aka 'pygmies' provides support to the Elephant Listening Project in the Central African Republic. Their intimate knowledge of the equatorial rainforest and its inhabitants has proven essential to the success of our field efforts.

More on the Ba'aka and their culture (PDF)>>

The Elephant Biology and Management Team

The EBM team is a group of African wildlife biologists, funded by Conservation International to specialize in the censusing of forest elephants. The team worked with the Elephant Listening Project in 2000 and 2002 to deploy recording units and carry out simultaneous dung-count surveys.

ELP's Extended Family