Following the announcement in September, Botswana’s ministry of the environment denied that there was a poaching crisis of any sort, and in May the government lifted a ban on trophy hunting that had been in place for five years, provoking worldwide condemnation.

Even some scientists wondered whether the illegal ivory trade really had found its way to Botswana. Now, the researchers have published data in the journal Current Biology that seems to confirm their initial findings.

Based on aerial surveys and field visits, the authors report that fresh elephant carcasses in Botswana increased by nearly 600 percent from 2014 to 2018.

Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the research, said that “there’s no question” about the authors’ findings.

“The work was exceptional in every way,” he said. “There were so many features they carefully and meticulously documented. And they also looked at alternative hypotheses, and none were supported by data.”