The wide open, arid lands of northwestern Namibia are home to the world’s largest living land animal: the African elephant (Loxodonta africana). Like many large mammals, these iconic elephants are endangered, threatened by expanding agriculture, urbanization, human-elephant conflict, and poaching. As their populations continue to decline, researchers have turned to conservation corridors - links between habitats - as a key strategy to strengthen the population's chance of survival. In a new study, researchers used a combination of GPS tracking data and satellite imagery to map elephant movement throughout the landscape in northwestern Namibia. They found that elephants moved freely within the region’s protected areas, including Etosha National Park and community-managed lands in the neighboring Kunene region, but that there was little movement between each protected area. The study, led by Aung Chan of Colorado State University, was published in Landscape Ecology. Landscape connectivity matters from both an ecological and genetic perspective. Spanning more than 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles), Etosha National Park is almost as big as New Hampshire. But a single park could never sustain a whole species. Small populations of mammals within an isolated landscape face higher risks of inbreeding or being wiped out by a single catastrophic environmental event. Chan and colleagues used eight years of GPS tracking data to create a "movescape" that depicted not just where elephants were, but how long they stayed and how fast they moved on the landscape. The data revealed only three connective routes between Etosha National Park and protected lands in the Kunene region.