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An icon of African conservation, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, passed away on 9 December 2025. Over the course of 6 decades, Iain transformed global understanding of African elephants and reshaped the scientific and policy frameworks that underpin their conservation today. Iain's scientific career began by providing the first documentation of the richness of elephant social lives through his doctoral work, which established the foundation for elephant behavioral ecology (Douglas-Hamilton, 1972). He and his wife Oria Douglas-Hamilton later popularized their work in the book Among the Elephants (Douglas-Hamilton & Douglas-Hamilton, 1975), which helped bring the cognitive and emotional capacities of elephants into global consciousness. Alongside his contemporaries, including Jane Goodall, Iain helped shift scientific norms by demonstrating the value of studying animal societies through long-term, individual-based observation. The rapid escalation of ivory poaching in the 1970s and 1980s caused a pivot in Iain's career. Recognizing the serious threat this posed to elephants, he redirected his efforts to continent-wide population monitoring. Through extensive aerial surveys (Douglas-Hamilton, 1977, 1987), he became the primary source of reliable information on elephant numbers and trends across Africa. His work improved the accuracy of aerial census methods and introduced the systematic counting of carcasses and live elephants (Douglas-Hamilton & Burrill, 1991; Douglas-Hamilton & Hillman, 1981; Dublin & Douglas-Hamilton, 1987). This innovation provided a robust proxy of population decline and remains standard practice in elephant surveys today. Iain's data and analyses laid the foundation for the early African Elephant Database (Burrill & Douglas-Hamilton, 1987) and led to the establishment of the International Union for Conservation of Nature African Elephant Specialist Group, which he founded to coordinate survey data and status assessments across the species’ range. His detailed knowledge and ability to communicate effectively made him a central figure in elephant conservation policy. His time and effort increasingly focused on the development and implementation of ivory trade conservation policy. He was one of the first to transition from fundamental science to applied conservation science with a strong policy focus. He played a key role in raising awareness of the ivory crisis, contributing to the momentum that culminated in the 1989 international ban on ivory trade through the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). His efforts helped catalyze the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant Conservation Fund, which until 2025 provided essential support to field conservation programs across the continent. Following the stabilization of elephant populations after the ivory ban, Iain continued to refine continental monitoring systems and contributed to the conceptual foundations of the CITES Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants Programme. The demographic approach he helped develop (use of ratios of live to dead elephants to infer population change) became central to quantifying poaching pressure across Africa (Wittemyer et al., 2014). Later in his career, Iain returned to behavioral ecological research with renewed focus on the nuances of individual elephant behavior. He became engaged in movement ecology and conducted some of the early studies of elephant movement behavior in which GPS tracking and aerial surveys were used in combination to inform landscape-scale conservation (Douglas-Hamilton et al., 2005). His work extended to studies of cognition and emotions in elephants, including research on elephants’ interactions with their dead (Douglas-Hamilton et al., 2006). He also championed innovative approaches to human–elephant coexistence, including early work on elephants’ aversion to bees (Vollrath & Douglas-Hamilton, 2002), which later inspired beehive fence mitigation strategies (King et al., 2009). Iain's commitment to elephants extended beyond his own research. He co-founded the Samburu elephant research project in Kenya, which has become one of the world's most important long-term studies of elephant societies. Through this work, he mentored and inspired a new generation of elephant researchers, including myself, shaping the field for decades to come. Throughout his life, Iain embodied the role of the applied behavioral ecologist. His scientific curiosity was redirected by the urgent need for elephant conservation. He challenged the political and economic forces driving elephant declines with robust data and logic and was particularly influential in policy and politics. His dedication helped awaken the world to the devastation caused by ivory consumption and was instrumental to the survival of African elephants. Iain Douglas-Hamilton leaves behind a profound scientific legacy, a global conservation movement shaped by his leadership, and generations of researchers and conservationists inspired by his example. His life's work fundamentally altered humanity's understanding of and relationship with elephants.