The community of elephants that call Africa's Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL) home once thrived there. During multiple surveys of in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists found that specific locations within the GVL, like the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area and Virguna National Park, had anywhere from 1,300 to 4,000 individuals.
But starting in the 1990s, the elephants' numbers began to precipitously drop thanks to human activity like land use, political conflict and poaching. Today the African elephants throughout the continent are listed as endangered, and the highly intelligent animals seem to be aware on some level that humans are to blame for their plight. Elephants have been reported to flee from other areas where there was heavy poaching to the relative safety of the GVL, causing the population there to rise.
