UW-Led Initiative Helps Map World’s Largest Land Mammal Migration
Published May 01, 2025
New maps released this week document the world’s largest land mammal migration, revealing the seasonal journeys of more than 5 million white-eared kob and tiang antelope across South Sudan and Ethiopia. The work was made possible by the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration (GIUM), a partnership of international researchers headquartered at the University of Wyoming that is producing detailed maps to guide conservation and infrastructure planning to protect ungulate migrations worldwide. “The Great Nile Migration is one of Earth’s most extraordinary wildlife spectacles, even larger in numbers and spatial extent than the wildebeest migration of the Serengeti,” says Matthew Kauffman, a leading science adviser to GIUM and a professor of wildlife biology at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit based at UW. The maps were informed by animal tracking data collected by African Parks and the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. They depict, in unprecedented detail, the expansive “Great Nile Migration,” one of the last remaining large-scale land migrations on Earth. All told, biologists estimate the migrations include approximately 5 million to 7 million animals across four species -- white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle and Bohor reedbuck.
