The good folks at GoogleEarth have been providing ATE with a complimentary license for GoogleEarth Pro for several years. We have used the facility a number of times, for example, in reporting in these pages on seismic events in the ecosystem.

We shall be adding other coverages for viewing on GoogleEarth (you can download GoogleEarth for free from here), for example, realtime tracking of Amboseli elephants with GPS satellite collars.

We shall also provide on this forum topic access to special GoogleEarth coverages (called KML or KMZ files), such as the two here for the Amboseli National Park boundary and the extent of the elephant-defined Amboseli-Kilimanjaro ecosystem.

For example, here's an image from Google Earth Pro of the whole of the Amboseli ecosystem with some of the GPS layers that we have been building in support of our research and conservation work. All of the layers are accessible to anyone using Google Earth from the file below, Amboseli_GPS_data.kmz.

Amboseli ecosystem from Google Earth

If you have Google Earth installed, you can just click on a KMZ file below, and the Amboseli layers should appear in Google Earth. Zoom in to see the location of the Elephant Research Camp (ERC), or the huge new elephant-exclosure fence that KWS has erected, just to the west. Browse through the folders in the 'Amboseli' block that has appeared in your GE sidebar and see if you can activate the files showing the locations of our four GPRS- and satellite-tracked elephant families. We plan to make such features part of the Google Earth Community resources.

You will note that not all the GPS'd roads are perfectly aligned yet. Some were recorded years ago before the Global Positioning Satellite system became accurate to a few meters. We're fixing them thanks to the precision of Google Earth. If you have any updates from your own visits to Amboseli, please share your KML or KMZ files with us.

Watch this space...