Peter Wrege

Peter became the director of the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) in January 2007. A behavioral ecologist, Peter has made Ithaca his base for more than 30 years, but has been fortunate to work for long periods of time in the field, observing animals in their natural environments and trying to understand what makes them tick. Although he has worked in such exotic places as Venezuela, Panamá, and the Galapagos, his eight years of research in Kenya, East Africa, were particularly influential. He is very happy to be back in Africa to carry on ELP’s research program in the equatorial rainforests of the Congo Basin.

Liz Rowland

Liz joined the Elephant Listening Project in 2004 as a data analyst, concentrating on testing automatic detectors to find elephant calls in long recordings that were made in the field. Now she is also helping with the general running of ELP.

Andrea Turkalo

A biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and a member of the IUCN's African Elephant Specialist Group, Andrea has devoted the past 20 years to the first demographic study of African forest elephants. She has identified and catalogued over 4,000 individuals dwelling in the Dzanga National Park, Central African Republic and continues to track their family lives and associations. As a founding member of the Elephant Listening Project, Andrea's knowledge of this population is an integral part of the project.

Katy Payne

A lifelong naturalist and amateur musician, Katy began her career studying the evolving songs of the humpback whale. She shifted her focus to elephants in 1984, when she and two colleagues discovered infrasonic calling in elephants by recording at a zoo. The studies that followed from this discovery have shown that elephants use their low-frequency calls to coordinate their social behavior over long distances. She founded ELP in 1999, and was the leader of the project until 2006, when she officially retired. Katy is now writing a book about forest elephants, and continues to play a critical role in all ELP's activities.

Modeste Douckaga

Modeste has been observing and identifying elephants in Gabon for more than five years. As part of the Wildlife Conservation Society elephant research team, he has been the key person establishing a database of elephant identities for Langoue Bai, Ivindo National Park.

Modeste is now teaching new researchers about elephant observation and identification.

Olivia Schultz

Oliva works with the Elephant Monitoring Team at the Wildlife Conservation Society - Gabon, consulting on strategy and developing initiatives for elephant conservation.

She plays a key role in keeping ELP's acoustic monitoring projects ticking over and helping us identify places where we could assist in attaining conservation goals.

Clement Inkamba-Nkulu & Russel Tsoumou

Clement and Russel are Congolese biologists who have been working with WCS-Congo for many years. Clement recently completed his MSc degree, studying the movement of forest elephants among a cluster of clearings in Congo, including the Dzanga clearing studied by Andrea Turkalo.

Clement is principle investigator on a new study at two recently discovered bais in Congo, just east of Djobo Bai in Gabon. This is a critical area for forest elephants and currently under considerable pressure from poachers. Clement and Russel are working with ELP to collect acoustic data at these bais and also to make the first attempts to use night-vision photography to identify individuals visiting the bai at night.

Compagnie Equitoriale des Bois

CEB was the first company in Gabon to operate under the principles of sustainable forestry management. CEB produced Central Africa's first comprehensive forestry management plan. Under Gabonese law, the forest must be managed on a sustainable basis. The company is owned by Precious Woods.

ELP has been recording elephants at several forest clearings, or bais (the foresters call them 'salines') in this concession, including one that turns out to be the most active bai known to date in Gabon!

Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS has been working in Gabon since 1985 when Richard Barnes started a 4-year project to estimate the number of elephants there. WCS has been working with Gabon National Parks Office to manage a number of the protected areas there. ELP has been working as a collaborator with WCS since 2007, providing new and different information about forest elephants to help in the conservation effort.

Mya Thompson

A member of the Elephant Listening Project since its inception in 1999, Mya took a break to study for a PhD and have two babies! Her research focused on improving acoustic monitoring methodologies for African forest elephants and understanding the role vocal signals play in maintaining their social system. She was awarded her doctorate in September 2009.

Mya now pursues her passion for education as part of the education program at the Lab of Ornithology (close at hand for frequent consultation about all things elephant).

Melissa Groo

Melissa Groo has been a research assistant with ELP since its inception in 1999. Amongst many roles, she helped to design and then populated our video database with more than a thousand annotated clips of forest elephant behavior. She maintains listserves on African/Asian elephant news and resources, sponsored by Save the Elephants. All these articles are archived here, where you can also sign up for the listserves or visit our International Elephant News page.

Nicolas Bout

Nico has been dedicated for many years to understanding the ecosystem known as the Plateaux Bateke, with a special commitment to the conservation of large mammals, especially the forest elephant.

As head of the Bateke Elephant Project he made important strides toward expanding our knowledge of how elephants use this ecosystem, and increasing the interest and commitment of local people to find alternative land uses that are compatible with sharing the landscape with elephants and other important fauna.

Nico has been a key collaborator with ELP in our monitoring efforts in the Bateke region.

Richard Barnes

Dr. Richard Barnes was one of ELP's founding members. He organized and participated in ELP's work in Kakum National Park, Ghana. 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 Gulick

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 Thompson and Nik Batruch

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.

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.