The total estimate of the elephant population for the sanctuary was (230+20) or between (210 and 250). The population size of the elephant was estimated indirectly from the dung droppings using line-transect methods within a 42 km2 area of which, each 12 km2 area in riverine and woodland, and 18 km2 in bushland habitats. The study was carried out between May 2019 and April 2020. The focus of this paper is to study the population size and age structure of elephants, and their seasonal movement patterns in Babile Elephant Sanctuary (BES), Eastern Ethiopia. Our results demonstrate how the combined use of digital photogrammetry and geometric morphometrics can complement, and in some cases, replace existing elephant aging techniques. Finally, we explored the application of geometric morphometrics for evaluating craniofacial shape changes across male elephant age classes using photographs. In addition, craniofacial metrics provide further quantifiable information on adults that would make it possible to distinguish elder individuals within the population. We also determined that photogrammetrically derived estimates of sulcus width, midface width, and craniofacial length effectively predict shoulder and foot metrics and can be used to quantify individual growth rates from photos collected over time. Consistent with other populations, we found strong linear relationships between measurements of hind foot length and shoulder height that are traditionally used to infer age in the species. Shoulder height, hind foot length, and photogrammetric craniofacial measurements were collected from male African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Etosha National Park, Namibia across a multi-year period in order to estimate ages within this population.
2021), to the ecological and evolutionary studies of animal morphological variation (Kerschbaumer and Sturmbauer 2011 Bower and Piller 2015 Cardini et al.
This suite of techniques has been applied across a number of fields ranging from forensic analysis and classification of human (Franklin et al.
Categories are arranged in order from youngest (quarter) to eldest (elder) that include qualitative descriptions adapted from Moss (1996) (Bookstein 1992 Adams et al. In addition to standard photogrammetric methods, geometric morphometrics (GMM)-the quantitative analysis of morphological shape variation and covariation using Cartesian coordinates of anatomical landmarks instead of traditional linear and ratio-based measurements-provides the opportunity to assess two-dimensional (2D) shapes of elephant Table 1 Ordinal age classes and associated diagnostic criteria for comparative aging of male African elephants in Etosha National Park, Namibia.
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