19th August 2026
LMH in the Field: Understanding Elephants
In Namibia’s remote Kunene Region, Jessica Tacey (2023, DPhil Biology) is exploring what it takes for people and elephants to share the same landscape.
In the remote Kunene Region of north-west Namibia, people and elephants share an increasingly challenging landscape. Each day, elephants can travel up to 70km in search of water, drinking around 150 litres in one of the world’s most arid environments.
For LMH’s Jessica Tacey (2023, DPhil Biology), understanding how people and elephants can share this landscape forms the basis of her research.
Based at Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and working closely with the Namibia Nature Foundation, Jessica’s DPhil explores human-elephant conflict in Namibia and how it can be better understood and managed to support coexistence.
Jessica is approaching that question from two directions: observing how elephants respond to the environments around them, and learning from the people who live alongside them about how they believe elephants should be managed.
“For the fieldwork I am currently working on, I have been living in the bush for the last few months on a wildlife reserve and a private farm, setting up and maintaining an experiment,” Jessica explains.
“I designed and built objects to place in the field that appear new and unfamiliar to the elephants, and my team and I have set up a series of hidden cameras to document how the elephants react to these new things in their environment when they come across them on their way to the waterhole for a drink.
“From this, I want to know whether their reactions differ across landscapes”
Each day, Jessica and her team drive around an hour into the bush to check on the study. Working in such a remote environment means the equipment needs constant attention.
“Often our cameras and objects need to be repaired, reattached to the trees they are mounted on, or replaced entirely, as the curious elephants love to cause havoc overnight,” Jessica says.
For Jessica, though, seeing the elephants in their natural habitat is part of what makes the fieldwork so rewarding.
“They are such a fascinating and highly social species,” she says. “To get to watch the calves playing with one another or splashing about while taking a bath, and the care with which the mothers and ‘aunties’ watch out for each other and their babies is mesmerising.
“It’s exciting to check the camera footage to see what the elephants have been up to.”
The field study is taking place in two contrasting settings: a wildlife reserve, where the elephants live without the pressure of conflict with people, and private farmland, where interactions with people can be more challenging. By comparing the two, Jessica hopes to understand whether elephants respond differently to unfamiliar things depending on the landscapes they inhabit.
But understanding elephant behaviour is only part of the picture. Across the Kunene Region, Jessica has also spent time learning from the people who share this landscape with the elephants.
“Their knowledge about elephants and about the landscape has been nothing short of fascinating, and their willingness to take time out of their day to speak with me and my team was so generous,” she says.
Those conversations offered Jessica a different way of understanding the landscape. The people she met pointed her towards the major “elephant highways” that criss-cross the region, pathways through the bush used by generations of elephants to find water, with younger members of family groups learning the routes from older animals.
The routes run through villages, along riverbeds and across roads, showing how closely elephant movement is tied to the places where people live.
“I will also never forget driving through the most stunning landscapes I have ever seen in our journey to survey people in remote villages. Jagged mountain ranges, expansive grasslands, lush forests, and seemingly endless deserts that feel like you could be traversing Mars”
These conversations also formed the basis of the first part of Jessica’s social science research: a survey exploring how different communities would like elephants to be managed, and what approaches they consider acceptable. From scaring elephants away or moving them to another location to removing individual animals seen to be causing repeated problems.
Jessica and her team surveyed around 700 people living in remote villages across areas of the Kunene with high, medium and low reported levels of human-elephant conflict. The surveys were conducted in two local languages, Otjiherero and Khoekhoegowab, and will be complemented by an online survey of participants in the US and Germany – two countries that actively fund the majority of international conservation initiatives in Namibia.
She is also interested in ensuring that the experiences of people living alongside elephants are given greater weight in conservation research and decision-making.
“It is crucial to include the voices and preferences of those who live alongside elephants in the conservation science research and management measures that involve them, which has historically not happened.”
By bringing together observations of elephant behaviour with the experiences and preferences of people living alongside them, Jessica hopes to build a fuller picture of human-elephant conflict in the Kunene Region, and of what coexistence might look like in different parts of the landscape.
