Human footprint and protected areas shape elephant range across Africa

Wall, Jake; Wittemyer, George; Klinkenberg, Brian; LeMay, Valerie; Blake, Stephen; Strindberg, Samantha; Henley, Michelle; Vollrath, Fritz; Maisels, Fiona; Ferwerda, J.G.; Douglas‐Hamilton, Iain

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.042

Cited by 62 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Ecological conditions were strongly predictive of exploration of the soft release site, both for initial visits to permanent water points and area (1 km 2 grid squares). This is consistent with studies of wild savannah elephants indicating that home ranges expand during the wet season when proximity to permanent water is no longer limiting (Redfern et al, 2003;Young et al, 2009;Wall et al, 2021). To date, elephant translocations into Sera Wildlife Conservancy have been timed to coincide with rains and favorable ecological conditions.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Goldenberg¹,

Hahn²,

Stacy‐Dawes³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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The ability to locate essential resources is a critical step for wildlife translocated into novel environments. Understanding this process of exploration is highly desirable for management that seeks to resettle wildlife, particularly as translocation projects tend to be expensive and have a high potential for failure. African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are very mobile and rely on large areas especially in arid environments, and are translocated for differing management and conservation objectives. Thus, research into how translocated elephants use the landscape when released may both guide elephant managers and be useful for translocations of other species that adjust their movement to social and ecological conditions. In this study, we investigated the movement of eight GPS tracked calves (translocated in three cohorts) following their soft release into a 107 km2 fenced wildlife sanctuary in northern Kenya and compared their movement with that of five tracked wild elephants in the sanctuary. We describe their exploration of the sanctuary, discovery of water points, and activity budgets during the first seven, 14, and 20 months after release. We explored how patterns are affected by time since release, ecological conditions, and social factors. We found that calves visited new areas of the sanctuary and water points during greener periods and earlier post-release. Social context was associated with exploration, with later release and association with wild elephants predictive of visits to new areas. Wild elephants tended to use a greater number of sites per 14-day period than the released calves. Activity budgets determined from hidden Markov models (including the states directed walk, encamped, and meandering) suggested that released calves differed from wild elephants. The first two cohorts of calves spent a significantly greater proportion of time in the directed walk state and a significantly lower proportion of time in the encamped state relative to the wild elephants. Our results represent a step forward in describing the movements of elephant orphan calves released to the wild following a period of profound social disruption when they lost their natal family and were rehabilitated with other orphan calves under human care. We discuss the implications of the elephant behavior we observed for improving release procedures and for defining success benchmarks for translocation projects.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Goldenberg¹,

Hahn²,

Stacy‐Dawes³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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“…The safety factor was also evident in the relaxed behavior of herds in the park and their clumped and agitated formations in moving out of the park (63) and in response to human disturbances (76). Most movements out of the park were nocturnal, a pattern common to other protected area populations in response to human threats (23).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The million years or more of human-elephant coevolution has shaped the ecological, behavioral and cultural adaptations in elephants and people. Elephants readily distinguish human responses by, for example, foraging beyond park boundaries at night to avoid people (23), yet acting benignly around safari vehicles, lodges and campsites in parks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that elephants have contracted to a fifth of available habitat due human displacement (23), how did the interaction of elephants and humans play out before the industrial and colonial age (28), how has their interaction change as a result, and how can the space and mobility needed to avoid compression and ecological degradation be reestablished?…”

Section: Evidence Points To the Depletion Of Elephant Populations Across Eastern And Southernmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most studies have, however, been conducted in protected areas where the impact of elephants especially has been intensified by human activity causing compressed populations and curtailed seasonal movements. Wall et al (2021) showed the distribution of elephants to occupy only 17% of their potential range due to the level of the human disturbance and safety in protected areas. Normalized for rainfall, censuses of 34 populations showed elephant densities in East Africa to be five-times higher in protected than non-protected areas (24).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cascading effects of elephant-human interactions in a savanna ecosystem and the implications for ecology and conservation

Western

Mose

2021

Preprint

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Our study monitored the changes in elephant numbers, distribution and ecological impact over a fifty-year period as the free-ranging intermingled movements of wildlife and traditional subsistence pastoralists across the Amboseli ecosystem were disrupted by a national park, livestock ranches, farms, settlements and changing lifestyles and economies. Elephants compressed into the national park by poaching and settlement turned woodlands to grassland and shrublands and swamps into short grazing lawns, causing a reduction of plant and herbivore diversity and resilience to extreme events. The results echo the ecological findings of high-density elephant populations in protected areas across eastern and southern Africa. The impact has led to the view of elephants in parks being incompatible with biodiversity and to population control measures. In contrast to Amboseli National Park, we found woody vegetation grew and plant diversity fell in areas abandoned by elephants. We therefore used naturalist and exclosure experiments to determine the density-dependent response of vegetation to elephants. We found plant richness to peak at the park boundary where elephants and livestock jostled spatially, setting up a creative browsing-grazing tension and a patchwork of habitats explaining the plant richness. A review of prehistorical and historical literature lends support to the Amboseli findings that elephants and people, the two dominant keystone species in the savannas, have been intimately entangled prior to the global ivory trade and colonialism. The findings point to the inadequacy of parks for conserving mega herbivores and as ecological baselines. The Amboseli study underlines the significance of space and mobility in expressing the keystone role of elephants, and to community-based conservation as a way to win space and mobility for elephants, alleviate the ecological disruption of compressed populations and minimize population management.

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Range‐wide indicators of African great ape density distribution

Ordaz‐Németh

Sop

Amarasekaran³

et al. 2021

American J Primatol

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Species distributions are influenced by processes occurring at multiple spatial scales. It is therefore insufficient to model species distribution at a single geographic scale, as this does not provide the necessary understanding of determining factors. Instead, multiple approaches are needed, each differing in spatial extent, grain, and research objective. Here, we present the first attempt to model continent‐wide great ape density distribution. We used site‐level estimates of African great ape abundance to (1) identify socioeconomic and environmental factors that drive densities at the continental scale, and (2) predict range‐wide great ape density. We collated great ape abundance estimates from 156 sites and defined 134 pseudo‐absence sites to represent additional absence locations. The latter were based on locations of unsuitable environmental conditions for great apes, and on existing literature. We compiled seven socioeconomic and environmental covariate layers and fitted a generalized linear model to investigate their influence on great ape abundance. We used an Akaike‐weighted average of full and subset models to predict the range‐wide density distribution of African great apes for the year 2015. Great ape densities were lowest where there were high Human Footprint and Gross Domestic Product values; the highest predicted densities were in Central Africa, and the lowest in West Africa. Only 10.7% of the total predicted population was found in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Category I and II protected areas. For 16 out of 20 countries, our estimated abundances were largely in line with those from previous studies. For four countries, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and South Sudan, the estimated populations were excessively high. We propose further improvements to the model to overcome survey and predictor data limitations, which would enable a temporally dynamic approach for monitoring great apes across their range based on key indicators.

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Human footprint and protected areas shape elephant range across Africa

Cited by 62 publications

References 54 publications

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Cascading effects of elephant-human interactions in a savanna ecosystem and the implications for ecology and conservation

Range‐wide indicators of African great ape density distribution

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