NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- In the face of a species-threatening poaching crisis, is it possible for an ecosystem to have "Too Many Elephants?" This is the question posed by the first episode of "Moving Giants," a new Silicon Valley Story Lab (SVSL)-produced video series that goes live today online and on a variety of social platforms.
Elephants are disappearing across the African continent at a rate of as many as 96 a day, primarily because of ivory poachers after their tusks. But the Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve (VLNR) in South Africa, location of the first episode of "Moving Giants," has the opposite problem: a surfeit of elephants is overwhelming the local ecosystem. The 124-square-mile park (about the size of Omaha, Nebraska) has a carrying capacity of between 40 and 60 elephants — and a current population of more than 270 of the enormous creatures. If 200 elephants are not moved off the property, the health of the delicate habitat will collapse, putting both the ecosystem and the survival of the elephants at risk.
The "Moving Giants" series takes its name from an ambitious elephant-conservation project under which 200 elephants are being translocated more than 1,000 miles from the Venetia Limpopo reserve to Mozambique's Zinave National Park, the elephant population of which was decimated by years of civil war. In all, the series will comprise seven episodes, starting today and concluding in January 2019. Later episodes will focus on the elephants' new home in Mozambique (a country whose ecosystems are in critical need of elephants because of the role they play as a keystone species); document how you move 2.5 million pounds of mega-herbivores, while keeping elephant families together; and capture the moment the first wave of elephants step into their new home in Zinave National Park.
The Moving Giants translocation effort is a public-private-civil society partnership, in which the participating parties are cooperating to enact cutting-edge conservation. The catalyst for the elephant-translocation project was De Beers Group, which owns the Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve. De Beers Group, which appointed SVSL to document the progress of the translocation, is also contributing $500,000 toward anti-poaching measures to help protect the elephants in their new home. De Beers' involvement exemplifies UN Sustainable Development Goal 17 (Partnerships) in action — a demonstration of how the private sector is critical to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The other parties to the partnership are the Mozambique government's National Administration of Conservation Areas (or ANAC, the Portuguese acronym) and the nonprofit Peace Parks Foundation (PPF), which jointly manage Zinave National Park. PPF was co-founded by Nelson Mandela and has since 1977 been working to protect large cross-border ecosystems by facilitating the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas, or so-called "peace parks," across southern Africa.
The "Moving Giants" video series can be viewed on the project's website, http://www.movinggiants.org, as well as on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a number of other web destinations.
For more information, please contact Silicon Valley Story Lab:
Lance Gould: [email protected]
Carina Kolodny: [email protected]
ABOUT MOVING GIANTS: Moving Giants is one of the largest international elephant-translocation efforts ever attempted. The project will move 200 elephants from Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve (VLNR) in South Africa 1,000 miles to Zinave National Park in Mozambique. VLNR is owned by [The] De Beers Group, while Zinave is co-managed by the Mozambique government's National Administration of Conservation Areas and the nonprofit Peace Parks Foundation, the latter co-founded by Nelson Mandela. "Moving Giants" is also the name of the video series that is capturing the capture, which can be viewed at movinggiants.org.
SOURCE Silicon Valley Story Lab
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