Forest elephants were long filed as a small forest form of a single African species. Molecular work through the 2000s and 2010s found a divergence between forest and savanna elephants comparable in depth to that between the Asian elephant and the extinct woolly mammoth, and showed limited gene flow between them outside narrow hybrid zones.
The practical consequence was a change in conservation accounting. In March 2021 the IUCN Red List assessed the two separately, listing the forest elephant as Critically Endangered and the savanna elephant as Endangered. Splitting the assessment revealed a steeper decline in forest populations than the combined figure had shown, because savanna numbers in southern Africa had partly masked forest losses further north.
The split is not merely bureaucratic. Forest elephants breed slowly, with females often not calving until their twenties, so recovery after heavy poaching is measured in decades rather than years. What remains disputed is where exactly the boundary lies on the ground, since hybrids occur where forest and savanna meet.