Significance
Despite the conservation importance of documenting temporal population trends of African elephants, we lack a comprehensive assessment of recent changes in the world’s largest terrestrial mammal. This assessment summarizes site-level trends in density over five decades from hundreds of surveys conducted across Africa on the forest and savannah elephant species. Both species have experienced substantial declines at the majority of survey sites. Forest elephant sites have declined on average by 90%, whereas savanna elephant sites have declined by 70% over the study period. However, savannah elephants have also demonstrated some increases, indicating that the threats and challenges elephants face are not the same everywhere. From the successes, we can learn how to better protect elephants across their range.