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For as long as elephants have shared landscapes with people, they’ve also carried the weight of controversy. In southern Africa in particular, images of toppled trees and stripped bark often spark alarmist claims: too many elephants, woodlands collapsing, something must be done. These conversations frequently circle back to ideas of carrying capacity and population control. But according to Dr Gabriella Teren — ecologist, founder of the Biodiversity Footprint Company and author of a detailed doctoral study on elephant impacts in Botswana — the reality is far more complex, and considerably less bleak. “Elephants absolutely change woodlands,” she says. “But change isn’t the same as damage, and it certainly isn’t the same as ecological collapse.” The kind of scene that gets tourists frothed up about elephant damage but is perfectly normal. (Photo: Gabriella Teren ) A long view of elephants and trees Teren’s PhD research focused on the Linyanti riparian woodlands of northern Botswana, which support some of the highest elephant densities in Africa during the dry season. What makes her work unusual is its time-depth and scale. Using detailed field surveys combined with aerial photography taken over nearly two decades, she was able to track not only whether trees were...

Tree-tree interactions vary from neutral at the sapling stage to negative at the adult stage. Neighbourhood density influenced adult tree growth but not survival. Suppressive effects of neighbours on...

The cheetah is a spotted beast that can burn through savannas like a bolt of lightning to hunt prey vastly bigger than itself. This big cat is the world’s fastest terrestrial mammal, which purrs more than it growls and has been historically tamed and trained by people to hunt game. Cheetahs once roamed most of Africa and western and southern Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula to India.

Tree planting has become a favored response to environmental loss. Governments, companies, and philanthropies announce large targets with reassuring round numbers. Forests, after all, store carbon,…

Ancient Indian poems and folk songs reveal that India's savannas are ancient ecosystems, not ruined forests. This discovery changes how we approach conservation and tree-planting.