Tanzania's savanna elephants have an odd habit: they climb mountains. Now there is camera-trap proof of exactly how many are doing it, and where.

  • 529 elephants recorded crossing the corridor in 15 months
  • 1,440 total mammals counted by 59 camera traps
  • 368 local landowners gave up farmland for the route
  • 14 kilometers long, linking savanna to rainforest

What the Camera Traps Found

In November 2023, the Southern Tanzania Elephant Program (STEP) installed 59 camera traps along a narrow 14-km strip of the Kilombero Valley, connecting the Udzungwa Mountains to Nyerere National Park. The goal was to find out whether a newly protected corridor was actually being used.

Fifteen months later, the answer was clear. The cameras logged at least 1,440 individual mammal crossings, according to reporting by Mongabay, with elephants alone accounting for 529 of them. Bushbuck, buffalo, servals, honey badgers, and Sykes' monkeys also showed up in the footage.

The corridor matters because of what the elephants do with it. Up to 1,000 of the region's elephants spend part of the year climbing the Udzungwa's steep, rainforest-covered slopes before descending back to open savanna — a seasonal migration that depends entirely on this single connected strip of land staying open.

Farmers Who Made Room

Protecting the route meant persuading people who farmed it to move or change how they used the land. 368 local landowners agreed to give up cultivation rights along the corridor, according to goodgoodgood.co's coverage of the project, clearing the way for Tanzania to formally designate it as the country's first official wildlife corridor in April 2025.

"They go everywhere," said Trevor Jones, director of strategy and development at STEP, describing the elephants' unusual mountain-climbing range.

Villagers and STEP's partner organization, Reforest Africa, have since planted 100,000 native trees inside the corridor, representing 30 species raised in a nursery in Mang'ula village, with another 50,000 trees planned. The replanting restores forest cover that elephants and dozens of other species rely on to move safely between the two protected areas.

A Model for Human-Elephant Coexistence

Wildlife corridors only work if the humans living along them benefit too, not just tolerate the arrangement. STEP's approach paired the land-use changes with compensation, replanting jobs, and ongoing monitoring that gives the community a direct stake in the corridor's success.

The 15-month camera-trap dataset now gives Tanzania something rarer than good intentions: hard evidence that a corridor negotiated with 368 individual landowners is actually functioning as elephants, buffalo, and dozens of smaller species use it exactly as designed. For a country balancing agricultural pressure against some of Africa's most important elephant populations, that proof may be the most valuable export of the whole project.

STEP, which has worked in southern Tanzania since 2014, says the corridor is now part of a wider effort to protect the Udzungwa and Ruaha-Rungwa landscapes, two of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the country. More camera traps are planned to track how usage changes as the newly planted trees mature.