A team of researchers in Africa has used state-of-the-art tracking technology to discover the continent's longest land mammal journeys, the annual migration of Plains -- or Burchell's -- Zebra.

As recently documented by observers from the international World Wildlife Fund, the migration reaches from Namibia to Botswana, a round-trip distance of more than 300 miles, and involves up to several thousand zebra traveling in a north-south direction.

The massive trek takes place entirely within the confines of the largest trans-boundary conservation area in the world, a region known as the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA, which at 109 million acres is roughly the size of Sweden and crosses the five southern Africa countries of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

"The findings of this study emphasize the importance of trans-frontier conservation areas in conservation of the greater landscape," Pierre Du Preez, chief conservation scientist at Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism, which is charged with protecting the country's environmental resources, said in a news release. "This study has played a crucial role in helping determine a crucial wildlife corridor in KAZA."

Robin Naidoo, a senior conservation scientist with the WWF, teamed up with the MET and Botswana-based conservation organization Elephants Without Borders and fitted satellite collars onto eight female zebras -- chosen because females are typically more gentle on the collars than are are males and they tend to travel in herds. T

Global Positioning System tracking provided updates on the zebras' exact locations every 4-5 hours during the migration.

The zebras completed the first half of the trip in a two-to-three-week span last in November and December, likely in search of fresh grazing in Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park, which has a rainy season that allows the zebras to survive without permanent water sources for an estimated 10 weeks before returning to the Chobe River, which snakes along the Namibia/Botswana border.

"In order to fully understand whether we're doing a good job at conserving wide-ranging species like zebra, we need a detailed understanding of their space requirements and movement patterns," said Naidoo, who has worked in the area since 2007. "In the same way that we're concerned with saving numbers of species and habitats, we should also be concerned with conserving phenomena that are inspiring spectacles in the world of nature. Mass migrations are one of those."

The new study's findings are expected to help scientists better understand -- and preserve -- the migratory routes of other species, like monarch butterflies, wild salmon and whales, all of which are increasingly disrupted and declining.