At the international conference of The International Ecotourism Society held in Nairobi on 25th to 27th September 2013, David Western and Megan Epler Wood were awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards for their contributions to ecotourism. Western’s studies and planning efforts in wildlife tourism in Amboseli in the 1970s were cited as pioneering work leading to emergence of ecotourism. Western and Megan Epler Wood jointly established The International Ecotourism Society in 1990 and Western and Chris Gakahu Ecotourism Kenya, the first ecotourism body in Africa five years later.  
At the Nairobi conference Western looked at the progress in ecotourism since 1997 when TIES, the Kenya Wildlife Service and Ecotourism Kenya jointly hosted an international workshop on Ecotourism at a Crossroad.  He pointed out that Kenya at that time represented the worst and best of tourism. On one hand Kenya had become notorious for minibus tourism crowding lions and cheetahs in national parks, on the other as a pioneer in community-based ecotourism. That same year Kenya Wildlife Service launched its Parks Beyond Parks movement to spur community conservation efforts on the 50th anniversary of park. The first community conservancy in Kenya was launched in Kenya the same year. A decade and a half later, the movement has spawned over 150 conservancies covering more than 6 percent of the land area of Kenya and conserving more than all national parks and reserves combined. Dixon Kaiyelo of the Wildlife Conservancy Association of Kenya, John Kamanga, coordinator of the South Rift Association of Kenya, Daniel Letoiye of the Northern Rangelands Trust and Benson Laitayan of the AmboseliEcosystsem Trust reviewed the remarkable growth of the Parks Beyond Parks movement and the growth of ecotourism from a community perspective.

http://www.responsibletravel.org/resources/documents/reports/TPhil_Conference_Kenya.pdf

ACP has studied the frequency and impact of drought in Amboseli over the past 47 years. Western began writing about the deepening threat of drought in the national press in 2000, in what he dubbed the millennial drought. By then wildlife and livestock numbers in Amboseli and across Kenya were in decline due to shrinking range and degrading pastures, leading to a large scale collapse populations in 2009. The Worst Drought published in Swara detailed the collapse in Amboseli http://www.amboseliconservation.org/storage/Amboseli%20Drought%202009%20Swara.pdf . A further article in Scidev.net based on the long-term studies of ACP in Amboseli looked at the wider implications in the Horn of Africa. http://www.scidev.net/global/desert-science/opinion/better-grazing-practices-hold-key-to-kenyan-droughts.html.  ACP has continued to track the aftermath of the drought in Amboseli (here refer to last update). The NASA Goddard Centre in Washington DC expressed interest in collaborating with ACP to calibrate satellite imagery against the Amboseli monitoring data through the drought period. The preliminary finding show the prospects of coupling high tech satellite imagery with the low tech ground measurements of pasture and grazing David Maitumo conducts in Amboseli each month.

 http://www.earthzine.org/2013/07/22/tracking-vegetation-changes-in-kenyas-amboseli-national-park/

Victor Mose, ACP’s Head of Computation and Bio-statistical Services, successfully defended his Ph.D.  titled 
“Mathematical Modelling of the Dynamics of Migrations for Large Mammal Populations in the Amboseli National Park, Kenya”.

His work proposed a spatially explicit mathematical model of ungulate migrations based on the seasonal distribution of vegetation quantity, quality and allometric models of diet. He studied the impact of blocked corridors on herbivore populations using a spatial mathematical model that describes the movements and population dynamics of selected species. Aggregation methods were used to reduce the complexity of the model which uses actual parameters calibrated from long term data collected in Amboseli for over three decades. The results show that a possible mechanism of maintenance of biodiversity in the area could be due to an exchange of animals between the park and surrounding ecosystems, when the oscillations of species densities in the ecosystems are out of phase compared to each other and to those within the park. The migrants also broadly track the shifting patterns of vegetation growth and senescence according to body size. 
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1476945X12000220

Quick Study is just what it says — a rapid-fire look at a new conservation science study that might turn some heads.
MAY 21, 2013  |  by: DarciPalmquist  |  

The Study: Ahlering, M.A., J.E. Maldonado, L.S. Eggert, R.C. Fleischer, D. Western and J. Brown. 2013. Conservation outside protected areas and the effect of human-dominated landscapes on stress hormones in savannah elephants. Conservation Biology, 27: 569–575.

The Big Question: In East Africa, savannah elephants are increasingly expanding outside of protected parks and into surrounding areas where people and agriculture dominate. Do elephants experience stress when living alongside human populations — even in situations where they are not being actively poached? The answer, according to this new paper from lead author Marissa Ahlering of The Nature Conservancy and colleagues, can be found… in their poop.

Study Nuts and Bolts: The ability to measure stress hormones in wild animals has improved dramatically in the past decade with the development of fecal metabolite analysis techniques. In this study, scientists compared the levels of glucocorticoid (GC) hormone (which increases in response to stress) of elephants in a community conservation area (CCA) established by Maasai pastoralists with elephants at two nearby protected areas, Kenya’s Amboseli and Maasai Mara National Parks. The elephants in the CCA are exposed to “dense human settlements, agricultural areas, and intense livestock grazing on a daily basis,” while the elephants in the national parks are exposed to humans to a lesser extent, only through ecotourism and research.

To measure the stress hormone, scientists collected fresh dung samples from which they extracted DNA and hormone samples. The hormone samples were frozen immediately in liquid nitrogen, transferred to Nairobi for storage and then shipped overnight on dry ice to the United States where they were run through a series of metabolic analyses.

The Findings: The researchers found no evidence of chronic stress in the elephants living within the CCA. The stress levels of the CCA elephants were the same as elephants in the nearby protected area of Maasai Mara, although elephants at Amboseli exhibited lower stress than the other two groups.

What it all Means: The results surprised the researchers — they expected the elephants in the CCA to exhibit higher levels of stress due to a higher degree of contact with humans. These findings indicate that elephants can successfully live in human-dominated areas — and suggest that CCAs should be part of the solution in efforts to restore elephants to areas where illegal ivory poaching has decimated their populations.

http://login.oaresciences.org/whalecomonlinelibrary.wiley.com/whalecom0/doi/10.1111/cobi.12061/pdf