The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-two-month research fellowship by Dr. George Wittemyer to work with Dr. Silvester Nyakaana, at Makerere University in Uganda, and with Dr. Hans Siegismund at Copenhagen University in Denmark.
With elephant populations increasing in some parts of Africa and declining in others, wildlife authorities face a range of conservation issues including human elephant conflict, ivory poaching, and growing habitat confinement that demand a variety of management solutions such as translocation, fencing and increased policing. This project provides detailed information on fine-scaled genetic structuring of a free-ranging elephant population, offering needed information to managers and conservationists dealing with the variety of issues facing elephants today. This research builds on seven years of detailed records of individual association behavior, three years of G.P.S. radio tracking data, and genetic data from 20 microsatellite loci analyzed for 400 individuals to provide information on (a) the genetic basis for social behavior, (b) the spatial resolution where significant allele frequency differentiation occurs within a single contiguous population and (c) the affect of variable ecological conditions (seasonality) on hierarchical fission-fusion social structuring and temporal population genetic structuring. The PIS will advance theoretical research on the formation and function of social structure and provide information on the spatial resolution and degree of gene flow occurring within a contiguous population.
Dr. Nyakaana is head of the Wildlife Genetics Group at Makerere University Institute of Environment and Natural Resources, one of the leading ecology groups in Africa. Dr. Siegismund is an internationally recognized expert on the quantitative analytical methods of population genetics.
