Monitoring African Megafauna in an Anthropogenic Landscape: A 15‐Year Case Study of the Vulnerable West African Giraffe

Although the African continent remains rich in megafauna, around 50% are threatened with extinction by anthropogenic pressures, with West Africa showing the biggest decline. Many taxa like the West African giraffe ( Giraffa camelopardalis peralta ) have suffered great range loss and population declines. Now restricted to Niger, the remaining West African giraffe almost exclusively live in densely populated agricultural areas and share their habitat with humans and livestock. Using individual encounter history data from 15 years of annual photographic surveys (2005–2019), we calculated the population's abundance, growth rate, survival, and encounter probabilities. First, we utilised pattern recognition software (HotSpotter) to clean the photographic database and correct individual encounter histories. We subsequently removed 145 double‐counted ‘ghost’ individuals from 979 West African giraffe originally identified during the surveys through manual identification. Such errors and inadequate methodology caused a population overestimation of 18.9% between 2011 and 2018. Updated encounter histories enabled us to accurately calculate abundance and demographic parameters with capture‐mark‐recapture (CMR) methods. By 2018, the population was estimated to have grown to 562 individuals at an average growth rate of 12%. Our results suggest that the data processing methods used in Niger have been increasingly inaccurate. We recommend changes to both monitoring and subsequent data processing to improve their accuracy and effectiveness, and to increase the quality of conservation management decisions for the West African giraffe. Despite local threats, high survival rates and rapid population growth suggest that coexistence with humans can support the recovery of a depleted, slow‐breeding megafauna species, even outside protected areas.