KOTA KINABALU: An international team of researchers have found that elephants prefer habitats on the periphery of protected areas rather than the areas themselves.
They found that the majority of elephants spent more than half of their time outside of protected areas, preferring slightly disturbed forests and areas of regrowth.
However, protected areas still play an important role, with the elephants’ biggest preference being for areas within 3km of boundaries of the protected areas.
The new research, offering the most comprehensive analysis of Asian elephant movement and habitat preference to date, was published on Monday in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.
The researchers had analysed the movement and habitat preferences of 102 Asian elephants in Peninsular Malaysia as well as Sabah, recording over 600,000 global-positioning system (GPS) locations.
They believed that the preference for disturbed forests was related to food habits as elephants like to eat grass, bamboo, palms and fast-growing trees, which are common in disturbed environments but relatively scarce under the canopy of old-growth forests.
“Our results show that protected areas are very important but not enough as an overall strategy for Asian elephant conservation,” said Dr Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, one of the lead authors of the study.
“Given their preference for habitats outside the protected areas, elephants will inevitably come into conflict with people.
“This highlights the importance of promoting human-elephant coexistence around protected areas,” said Campos-Arceiz, who is from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and the University of Nottingham Malaysia.The authors made clear that their findings did not diminish the importance of protected areas, a cornerstone of global conservation strategies.
Prof Benoit Goossens from Danau Girang Field Centre and Cardiff University, the other lead author, added that the protected areas were the most effective tool for biodiversity conservation in general.
In the case of Asian elephants, he said protected areas provided long-term safety and represented the core areas for elephant conservation.Based on their findings, he said the researchers recommended that large protected areas be included with core areas where elephants could find safety.
Prof Goossens said it was also vital to incorporate ecological corridors to connect networks of protected areas.
“There must also be efforts to mitigate against human-elephant conflict, especially around protected areas, with emphasis on protecting people’s safety and livelihoods, as well as promoting tolerance towards elephant presence,” he added.
The Sundaic region, where the research took place, is a global hotspot for biodiversity.
However, it is estimated that only 50% of the region’s original forest remains and less of 10% (but almost 30% in Sabah) of it is formally protected.
Asian elephants are endangered and live in highly fragmented landscapes in this region.
In the study, the researchers analysed the movement of 102 Asian elephants and the data was compiled from over a decade of fieldwork by three research groups.
The researchers then compared this data with the locations of formally protected areas to see how much time elephants spent in these areas and the areas around them.