The Elephant Ethogram: A Library of African Elephant Behavior is made possible by generous support from the Crystal Springs Foundation, WildiZe Foundation, The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, the Marshall Frankel Foundation, the Gorongosa Project, the Oakland Zoo, National Geographic Society, Spur - The Perenchio Family Fund and individual donors.

We are extremely grateful to Off the Fence (The Netherlands), Carr Foundation/Gorongosa Media Project (US/Mozambique) and Bob Poole Films, for granting hundreds of hours of raw elephant footage shot for documentaries, for use by ElephantVoices in science and education. We have extracted and edited from this Gorongosa and Mara footage some 1,600 clips as examples of elephant behaviors. The criteria for selection of footage for The Elephant Ethogram was the scientific value of the behavior it documents rather than the quality of the particular footage.

We thank cinemaphotographers Emre Izat, Kate Bradbury, Bob Poole, Gina Poole and Carla Rebai for support, friendship and fun during filming and related work in Gorongosa and Maasai Mara, and Carla and Jennie Vazquez for getting us up to speed on Adobe Premiere Pro.

Mining some 18 TB of footage in search of elephant behavior, and extracting, editing and uploading of close to 2,500 video clips from the above sources as well as from our own archive, has taken several years of work. We want to express our gratitude to Thomas Stafford for his contribution toward the editing process during his engagement with ElephantVoices in 2018 and Selengei Poole-Granli for her help populating and promoting The Elephant Ethogram in 2021.

In the captions we have attempted to give the ages, genders and names of individual elephants depicted in the video and audio files. All mentioned individuals from Gorongosa and the Mara were named, or code-named, by ElephantVoices and are registered in the respective Mara and Gorongosa Who's Who & Whereabouts Databases. Amboseli elephants mentioned in video or audio files are named and aged by the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and we are grateful to our colleagues for sharing their decades-long demographic and individual identification data for use in this project.

We studied elephants in these three locations over many years (Amboseli ~25, Gorongosa 8, Mara 6) and we are enormously grateful for our long collaboration with individuals and organizations in these locations. In particular, we are grateful to the Amboseli Trust for Elephants for decades long friendships and collaborative research, to our many friends, collaborators and colleagues in the groundbreaking Gorongosa Project in Mozambique, and to friends, colleagues and conservancy and camp managers for their support during our time in the Mara.

We warmly thank the wildlife authorities in Kenya and Mozambique including the Kenya Wildlife Service, Narok County Council, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Amboseli National Park and Gorongosa National Park, for permission to carry out our studies and conservation work in these amazing places with extraordinary elephants. And we thank Lucy Bates for her clarity and her contributions during brainstorming sessions and Andy Dobson, Cynthia Jensen for their helpful comments. 

Documentary filming in Gorongosa, Mozambique. From left: Emre Izat, Joyce Poole, Bob Poole, Petter Granli and guide José Montinho.