Authors: Brown, Michael; Fennessy, Julian ;Stabach, Jared;

Giraffe are distributed across populations in 21 African countries, each with unique habitat characteristics, sociopolitical contexts, threats, and conservation opportunities. Effective conservation of these imperiled species requires clear understandings of ecological requirements, data-driven management strategies, and analytical frameworks for applying ecological theory towards conservation objectives across these populations. Through the Twiga Tracker Initiative, a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, researchers and conservation practitioners collaboratively deployed over 300 GPS tracking devices on giraffe across thirteen countries. Each project aspires to leverage the unique aspects of each site to cast new insight on giraffe ecology, generate actionable real-time data for site specific conservation objectives, and contribute to continental scale giraffe spatial ecology studies. This multi-scale approach to conservation and research is built on a foundation of strong collaboration with key stakeholders to define mutual research/conservation objectives. Pioneering the applications of data sharing platforms, the Twiga Tracker Initiative provides real-time visualisation and analytics of incoming giraffe data to meet local conservation goals, while providing central data repositories for larger scale ecology studies. In this presentation, we will explore case studies of these applications for harmonizing conservation and ecology research using giraffe tracking data.