Samuel Wasser at the University of Washington in Seattle and his team studied genetic material from 28 large ivory seizures between 1996 and 2014 to identify the origins of poached tusks. They found that 86–93% of savannah-elephant tusks seized by authorities since 2006 came from southeastern Tanzania and neighbouring northern Mozambique. A similar proportion of forest-elephant ivory originated from a region in central Africa: the nexus of Gabon, the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The data could help authorities to focus regulatory and law-enforcement efforts on these regions, the authors say.