African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are megaherbivores of the African savanna that require extensive ranges to provide key resources critical for their survival and reproduction, both at spatial and temporal scales. We studied seasonal differences in home range sizes and daily distance travelled to the nearest ephemeral surface water sources by five male and ten female African elephants in the eastern Okavango Panhandle in northern Botswana between 2014-2017. We hypothesized that (i) elephant home ranges would be larger in the wet season than in the dry season (because forage and water sources tend to be more plentiful and widely distributed in the wet season than in the dry season, and elephants would not be restricted to localized resource areas), and that (ii) distances traveled by elephants to the nearest ephemeral surface water sources would be larger in the dry season than in the wet as these ephemeral water sources successively dry up. Our findings supported the hypotheses of the study. Elephants had larger home ranges in the wet season than in the dry season and the daily distances traveled to the nearest ephemeral surface water sources were larger in the dry season than in the wet season. The findings indicate the need to consider seasonal variations in elephant space use in land use planning and protected area management to minimize restricting elephants access to critical resources as seasons change or droughts intensify due to climate change.

We investigate 85 129 MODIS satellite active fire events from 2007 to 2015 in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The region is the oil base for Nigerian economy and the hub of oil exploration where oil facilities (i.e. flowlines, flow stations, trunklines, oil wells and oil fields) are domiciled, and from where crude oil and refined products are transported to different Nigerian locations through a network of pipeline systems. Pipeline and other oil facilities are consistently susceptible to oil leaks due to operational or maintenance error, and by acts of deliberate sabotage of the pipeline equipment which often result in explosions and fire outbreaks. We used ground oil spill reports obtained from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) database (see www.oilspillmonitor.ng) to validate MODIS satellite data. NOSDRA database shows an estimate of 10 000 spill events from 2007 - 2015. The spill events were filtered to include largest spills by volume and events occurring only in the Niger Delta (i.e. 386 spills). By projecting both MODIS fire and spill as ‘input vector’ layers with ‘Points’ geometry, and the Nigerian pipeline networks as ‘from vector’ layers with ‘LineString’ geometry in a geographical information system, we extracted the nearest MODIS events (i.e. 2192) closed to the pipelines by 1000m distance in spatial vector analysis. The extraction process that defined the nearest distance to the pipelines is based on the global practices of the Right of Way (ROW) in pipeline management that earmarked 30m strip of land to the pipeline. The KML files of the extracted fires in a Google map validated their source origin to be from oil facilities. Land cover mapping confirmed fire anomalies. The aim of the study is to propose a near-real-time monitoring of spill events along pipeline routes using 250 m spatial resolution of MODIS active fire detection sensor when such spills are accompanied by fire events in the study location.