Elephant Populations Mapped Across Asia and Africa
A beautiful map above, created by Wanmei Liang, shows where all elephant groups live in Asia and Africa. Each color marks species and subspecies of elephants: purple for African savanna elephants, red for African forest elephants, pink for Sri Lankan elephants, orange for Indian elephants, and yellow for Sumatran elephants. This visual immediately makes clear the geographic split between Africa’s two elephant species (in different habitats) and Asia’s single species (broken into subspecies).
African elephants are actually two species: the large savanna elephant and the smaller forest elephant. Together there are roughly 400–415 thousand elephants left in all of Africa. Most are savanna elephants roaming wide-open bushland. For example, Botswana alone still has over 130,000. By contrast, only about 150,000 forest elephants remain in the dense Central African jungles. (The map shows these forest herds in red.) Both African populations have plunged by over half from their historical numbers, due mainly to ivory poaching and habitat loss. Human-elephant conflict and farmland expansion are shrinking their ranges.
Asia has one elephant species – the Asian elephant – but it’s divided into subspecies. Today the Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) is found across India and Southeast Asia (orange on the map), with about 20,000–25,000 individuals. The Sri Lankan elephant (Elephas maximus maximus, pink) lives only in Sri Lanka, around 2,500–4,000 strong. The Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus, yellow) is barely hanging on – only 2,400–2,800 remain, mostly in the island’s fragmented forests. (Another little-known subspecies – the Borneo elephant – is not shown on this map.) All Asian elephants are endangered, and their habitat is rapidly shrinking as rainforests are cut and farms spread. In Sumatra, for example, nearly 70% of forest cover has been lost recently, helping push the Sumatran elephant from “Endangered” to “Critically Endangered”.
Elephants play huge ecological roles (seed dispersal, forest clearing) and cultural roles (tourism, tradition). The fact that there are only a few hundred thousand left worldwide (down from millions) makes these maps an urgent reminder.
