In the Congo Basin, a Guitar Maker, a Map, and an Elephant Rewrite the Story of a Tree

There is a vibrant music scene here on the Shore, including many guitar and string players. By the time an ebony guitar fingerboard reaches a player, its origins are usually silent. In Central Africa, those origins are anything but.

ESRI – Deep in the humid forests of the Congo Basin, scientists tracing the fate of one of the world’s most coveted hardwoods—ebony—have uncovered a truth as elegant as it is urgent: without forest elephants, ebony forests cannot renew themselves.

The discovery comes from an unlikely alliance. A premium instrument maker, Taylor Guitars, joined forces with ecologists at the Congo Basin Institute to understand how ebony trees regenerate in a region under intense ecological pressure. What they found—published recently in Science Advances—is a vivid illustration of how modern mapping tools and Indigenous knowledge can converge to protect a fragile system.

At the center of the story is the forest elephant, a smaller, shyer cousin of the savanna elephant and among Africa’s most endangered mammals. For generations, the Baka people, Indigenous inhabitants of the rainforest, have understood the animal’s role intuitively. Now, science has caught up.

Mapping a Hidden Relationship

Using geographic information systems, or GIS, researchers mapped the distribution of young ebony trees across large swaths of Central African rainforest. They overlaid those maps with the most reliable data on forest elephant populations. The correlation was stark.

Where elephants were present, ebony saplings appeared with regularity. Where elephants had vanished—often due to poaching or habitat fragmentation—new ebony growth collapsed. In some elephant-free zones, sapling numbers dropped by nearly 70 percent.

“It’s a mutualism,” one researcher involved in the project said. “The tree feeds the elephant. The elephant ensures the tree’s future.”

Ebony trees produce large, fleshy fruits roughly the size of a softball. Many animals nibble at them, but only forest elephants can swallow the fruit whole, carrying the seeds intact through miles of dense forest. When the seeds are deposited in dung, they are cushioned, fertilized, and—crucially—hidden from rodents. Seeds dispersed this way were found to be up to 8.5 times more likely to survive than those that fell near parent trees or were handled by smaller animals.

From Research to Replanting

The findings have sharpened the mission of the Ebony Project, a long-running collaboration supported by Taylor Guitars. Since its inception, the project has planted more than 65,000 ebony trees through community-based programs involving local farmers and Baka families. The work is deliberately slow, rooted in trust and stewardship rather than extraction.

GIS technology has helped make that effort precise. Instead of planting blindly, conservationists can now identify habitats where ebony is most likely to thrive—and where elephant corridors still exist or could be restored. It is conservation guided by data, but grounded in people.

For Taylor Guitars, which relies on ebony for its instruments, the partnership reflects a broader reckoning in global supply chains. Protecting a resource, the company has argued, is inseparable from protecting the ecosystems and communities that sustain it.

A Broader Lesson

The implications extend far beyond guitars or even ebony. The Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest rainforest, a critical carbon sink and biodiversity reservoir. The study underscores a growing consensus among ecologists: saving species in isolation is not enough. The relationships between them—the quiet transactions of fruit and dung, seed and soil—are what keep forests alive.

As forest elephants continue to decline across Central Africa, the fate of ebony trees may serve as a bellwether. Lose the elephant, and a forest loses not just an animal, but a gardener.

In a time when conservation is often framed as a battle against loss, the Congo Basin study offers something rarer: proof that protection can be strategic, collaborative, and rooted in respect for both ancient knowledge and modern science.

Data for this story comes from A recent study published in Science Advances and supported by The Ebony Project—a collaboration between Taylor Guitars and scientists at the Congo Basin Institute (CBI), and from the ESRI blog, posted by David Gadsen.

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