- Summary
- Objectives
- Status
- Project Publications
The expanding magnitude of human-use areas has brought about an increase in the number of encounters between people and wildlife. Asian elephants generally prefer resource-rich areas away from human activity, but they sometimes stray into human-use areas in search of food and water or as they migrate from one landscape to another.
Through this project, we will analyse our previously collected data on elephants to assess the proximate factors that influence their decision-making to build predictive models of conflict that include future urbanisation in the peri-urban and urban areas of Bengaluru city to inform future developmental activities.
We will be focusing on human-elephant conflict in and around urban habitats, and provide guidelines for agriculture and infrastructure development and town planning in regions that are close to elephant habitats. We also hope to make policy-makers more receptive towards the elephant use of this already fragile forest habitat of southern India.
1. Assess environmental and biological factors influencing the current foraging and ranging decisions by elephants in the peri-urban areas of Bengaluru city.
2. Assess current trends in elephant distribution and human-elephant conflict in the districts of Bengaluru, Ramanagara, Tumakuru and Krishnagiri and to identify human-elephant conflict hotspots.
3. Develop predictive models of human-elephant conflict, given future trends in land use change in Bengaluru city, including Tumakuru, Ramanagara and Kanakapura towns based on the Master Plan 2031 of Government of Karnataka and the identification of Hosur as a special investment region by the Government of Tamil Nadu.
4. Generate guidelines that can act as a policy document to help urban development in regions co-habited by elephants.
- For the first objective, using recursive partitioning classification trees, we used data on elephant locations and contiguity, to assess environmental and biological factors influencing foraging and ranging patterns of Asian elephants, especially males, in peri-urban areas of Bengaluru. The results from this exercise provided us with the baseline values that reflect decision-making in individual elephants.
- We used these values, based on empirical data, for the second and third objectives to predict elephant movement under three scenarios of land use change:
- 1. Modeled: future land-use change is modeled based on past land-use change
- 2. Planned: future land-use change is modeled based on past land-use change, and incorporates planned changes to infrastructure as detailed in the Master Plans
- 3. Hopeful: future land-use change based on 1) and 2), which incorporates mitigation structures to enable increased permeability to elephant movement.
- We also assessed the change in habitat selection and daily activity patterns in elephants as they transitioned across a gradient of forest contiguity in peri-urban areas around Bengaluru. One of the main results suggests that when male elephants are in low contiguity areas with little available natural forest, they have modified their behaviour to select water bodies as refuge sites, more than expected based on its availability. In contrast, when they are in high contiguity areas, elephants use forests more than expected based on availability, and adjoining crop fields and scrublands as per availability.
- Finally, based on the results from this project, we developed policy guidelines for land use planning that can make the elephant use of these areas more compatible with that of human use.