Deforestation Increases Frequency of Incidents With Elephants (Elephas maximus)

Abstract

Damages by the Asian elephant ( Elephas maximus) range from crop raiding to loss of human lives, and understanding the underlying causes thereof could help reduce such incidents. Land-use change could be among the major causes of elephant incidents since they are long-lived and tend to have particular home ranges. To test this hypothesis, we assessed deforestation rates in sites between the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve and the Bhadra Tiger Reserve, Western Ghats of India between the 1960s and 2000s. Deforestation was calculated in windows of varying sizes to account for spatial scale responses. The locations of 624 incidents between April 2008 and March 2011 were used, and a database of 20,000 random locations provided contrasts. We used sets of 250 logistic regressions at each scale of deforestation to ensure that the significance of deforestation was independent of the randomly sampled contrast locations. A total of 6,761 km2 of forest and scrubland have disappeared from private forests in 50 years, with an average deforestation rate of –0.85%⋅y−1. The distribution of incidents followed an exponential decay with increasing distance from protected areas and a beta distribution against deforestation. Logistic regressions indicated a significant effect of deforestation at the small scale (1 km2 particularly and 4 km2). These results show that (a) incidents occur mostly near protected areas, and barriers or adaptation of livelihoods could address this problem and (b) deforestation is associated with increasing incidents with elephants. Avoiding deforestation and maintaining elephant population connectivity may help avoid incidents.