Human–elephant conflict mitigation 741
FIG. 1 Location of the study crop fields in and around each village located in the Chobe Enclave in north-eastern Botswana.
wet (April) and cold dry (May–July) season (Adams et al., 2017a). The floodplain area is dominated by small-scale sub-
sistence farming, with cultivation occurring in October– November and harvesting during February–May, depend- ing on the timing of annual rainfall. Arable farming and livestock production are the primary traditional livelihoods in the area (Gupta, 2013). The Chobe Enclave has one of the highest dry-season densities of elephants in the country, with an estimated 2.94 elephants per km2 (Chase et al., 2019). Elephants travel from the Chobe National Park and Chobe Forest Reserves through the Chobe Enclave to access water on the floodplain, browse on acacia Vachellia tortilis and A. erioloba, and graze on nutrient rich grass, during the night-time. In all study villages elephants are responsible for the majority of problemanimal control reports made to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, with 60%of reports relating to elephants in Kavimba, 51% in Muchenje and Mabele and 52% in Kachikau (DWNP, 2018). The ma- jority of damage occurs at night-time. Given the area’s high elephant density, the human reliance on crop cultivation and the close proximity of human settlements to protected areas, it is not surprising that the rate of negative human–elephant interactions is one of the highest in the country (Gupta, 2013).
Methods Selection of study fields
The NGO Elephants Without Borders has been working in the Chobe Enclave community since 2015 and has
conducted surveys with farming family households in both Mabele and Kavimba villages. For this study, we held mul- tiple participatory community meetings (kgotlas)ineachof the study villages and monitored wildlife corridors using elephant movement data collected with GPS collars and motion detection camera traps, to identify fields frequently visited by elephants.We identified and monitored 18 fields for two cropping seasons, during 1 November 2016–30 June 2018. Farmers participated on a voluntary basis and were eligible if they had fields,7 ha in which elephants had pre- viously damaged crops, and if they resided in or next to the field, to ensure that lights would not be stolen or damaged. All treatment (with a solar-powered strobe light barrier) and control fields (without barrier) contained growing crops. During season 1 (2016/2017) there were four control and six treatment fields, and in season 2 (2017/2018) there were seven control and nine treatment fields. Four fields acted as both control and treatment at different times within the same season (fields 15–18; Table 1); they were control for part of the season and became treatment for remainder of the season. We prioritized farmers located alongside and closest to the wildlife corridors in the area in the allocation of study fields. We predicted that because their fields were closer to the corridors used by wildlife to access the flood- plain, they would have a higher likelihood of being dam- aged by elephants and would experience more incidents (Songhurst et al., 2015). Although some were directly adja- cent to wildlife corridors, none of the participating farmers’ fields were located within the corridors themselves. We avoided fields that were surrounded by other farmers’ fields, so as to not encourage elephants to forage in other farmers’
Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 739–746 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001182
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