Current Status of Asian Elephants in Myanmar

Although Myanmar’s forests have long been considered an Asian elephant stronghold (e.g. Santiapillai & Jackson 1990), recent assessments revealed that this perception probably was overly optimistic and that populations have declined considerably during the last century (Table 1). In 2004, the Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division (NWCD) and the Smithsonian Institution organized a workshop to assess the current status of wild elephants and compile the most recent data (Leimgruber & Wemmer 2004). Together with a range-wide mapping workshop hosted by the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group in 2008 in Phnom Phen (Hedges et al. 2009) these two assessments provide the most recent information on Myanmar’s elephants, their status and distribution. Wild elephants