Community-based Wildlife Monitoring 

Round River Botswana, in partnership with our sister organization Round River Conservation, the University of Botswana Okavango Research Institute (ORI) and local Community Trusts, is assisting with wildlife monitoring in selected Wildlife Management Areas in northern Botswana.

Botswana is home to some of the world’s most abundant and diverse wildlife populations. Two immense wetlands, the Chobe-Linyanti-Zambezi Wetland and the Okavango Delta, support Africa’s largest concentration of carnivores and are home to over 60% of Africa’s elephants. The Okavango Delta recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the largest inland deltas in the world and supports a vast array of critical ecosystem services within an otherwise semi-arid region of northern Botswana. This effort in Botswana is to assist local communities to monitor these populations.

This program involves a variety of research activities that include assisting local communities with wildlife monitoring and wildlife demography studies, monitoring rare and threatened bird populations, computer, and equipment training with community escort guides, and conducting vegetation surveys.