Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration

What is GIUM?

Most of the world’s large terrestrial mammals are ungulates, and many of them migrate seasonally to sustain their massive herds on landscapes around the planet. The abundance that migration supports in turn promotes the resilience of the ecosystems that sustain subsistence hunting, rural economies, and provides the primary prey base for most of the world's top carnivores.

Today, the slow and steady spread of our human footprint represents a common threat to ungulate migrations across the globe. The wild landscapes that migrations require are increasingly fragmented and degraded by roads, fences, agriculture, energy development, and human settlements. Migrations are being lost for species as diverse as bighorn sheep, elk, bison, pronghorn, springbok, Thompson’s gazelle, hartebeest, scimitar-horned oryx, zebra, and wildebeest.

The Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration was formed to address threats common to migratory ungulates worldwide. In 2024, the GIUM launched the Atlas of Ungulate Migration, the world’s first living compendium of ungulate migration maps. The Atlas is intended to serve as a global tool to support migration conservation worldwide with publicly available migration maps that can inform conservation planning and infrastructure development. Created from tracking data and expert knowledge, corridor maps are being used to target fences for modification or removal, site road-crossing structures, adjust energy development footprints, and focus conservation efforts on working lands.

The GIUM’s participants include global experts representing the world's major terrestrial regions and most, if not all, of its longest migrations (e.g., Serengeti wildebeest, Arctic caribou, Mongolian gazelle, white-eared kob, African elephants, among many others). As a community of practice, GIUM seeks to spark conservation efforts worldwide by sharing and discussing new, ongoing, and proven approaches to maintain migration corridors across large landscapes.

Research Methods

Over the last two decades, advances in GPS technology have enabled a renaissance in the study of ungulate migration. A variety of humane capture methods allow researchers to attach GPS collars and track animal movement hourly for years at a time. The movement data from such studies are allowing researchers to document - and discover, in some cases - migrations in unprecedented scope and detail.

GPS Points to Population Level Corridors

For many ungulate herds around the world, conserving their migrations is constrained by a lack of detailed maps that identify key corridors or linkage areas. New analytical techniques now allow researchers to build detailed migration maps from the seasonal paths of tracked individuals. To delineate migrations, researchers first categorize all animal locations by season. In temperate regions, the key seasons are summer and winter ranges, whereas in tropical regions, most migratory herds move between dry and rainy season habitat. Statistical analyses are then used to delineate polygons representing seasonal ranges, stopovers, and corridors. A final step is to calculate high- and low-use corridors, which allows conservationists to target and conserve the most important corridor segments or linkage areas. Not all migratory herds use distinct corridors, but even mapping of wide-ranging, nomadic species, can illustrate critical habitats needed to sustain seasonal movements.

Species being studied by the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration

Participants

The Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration is comprised of researchers and conservationists around the globe who are conducting research on migratory ungulates or working to advance their conservation.

Science Advisory Board

Participants