Africa’s elephants are widely loved — and widely endangered. Poachers killed off nearly 30 percent of the continent’s savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, according to a survey published this week. Their populations are now declining at a rate of nearly 8 percent a year.

But there are actually two species of African elephants. Savanna elephants roam grasslands in east and southern Africa. The more diminutive forest elephants, only recently recognized as a distinct species, live in dense central and western jungles.

The new survey, called the Great Elephant Census, did not attempt to track forest elephants, mostly because they cannot been seen from the air. But other research shows their plight to be as desperate as that of their savanna cousins. Illegal killings of forest elephants for their tusks drove a 62 percent decline in their numbers from 2002 to 2013, according to one estimate.

Unfortunately, the species will not be rebounding any time soon. As reported in The Journal of Applied Ecology, forest elephants turn out to be one of the slowest reproducing mammals on Earth. Even if all poaching ceased immediately, researchers calculate that it would take 90 years for forest elephant populations to return to pre-2002 levels.