Acknowledgements

We are proud that our edited volume was commissioned by Cambridge University Press through Dr Dominic Lewis and Professor Michael Usher. Ours is one of the last of the long list of contributions to ecological scholarship reaching the scientific community and the public at large due to their vision and stamina. Both Dominic and Michael stood at the helm as the principal commissioning editors of the ‘Ecology, Biodiversity and Conservation’ series for several years, and we are truly grateful to them for the opportunity to share our collective work in this volume. Yet this collective work could not have been brought to fruition without the consolidating competence of the Antelope Specialist Group and its leadership; this specialist group operates within the remit of the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Because most of our readership is concentrated in tropical Africa, we wanted to make this book accessible to all even where there are no libraries. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for Open Access publishing from CIRAD (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement, Montpellier, France) and from the Foundation François Sommer (FFS) (Paris, France). The Foundation François Sommer also financed the costs of the symposium on African buffalo in 2014 in Paris, where the idea for this book was born. The FFS further co-financed the research reported in the doctoral theses of Thomas Prin, Elodie Wielgus and Daniel Cornélis also reported in this book.

We are very thankful for the editing skills and hard work carried out by our language editor Grace Delobel (DipTrans, Montpellier, France), who not only corrected many errors but often suggested clearer and better text. Finally, our Editor at Cambridge University Press, Aleksandra Serocka, often acted as our anchor cable to keep us, the editors, safely tethered to the Press when we were again in different remote places in Africa, often without Internet connections.