Food preferences determine human–elephant coexistence in African woodlands MARÍA MONTER O -B OT E Y,ALFONSO SAN MIGUEL and RAMÓN P EREA
Abstract Human–elephant coexistence remains a major conservation and livelihood challenge across elephant Loxodonta africana range in Africa. This study investigates the extent of elephant crop damage on 66 farms in the Selous–Niassa corridor (Tanzania), to search for potential management solutions to this problem. We found that the relative abundance of highly preferred crops (area covered by preferred crops divided by the total area of each farm) was by far the most important factor determining crop damage by elephants. Eighteen crop types were ranked according to their preference by elephants. Sweet potatoes, bananas, peanuts, onions, pumpkins and maize were the most preferred crops, with maize the most common crop among those highly preferred. On average elephants dam- aged 25.7% of the cultivated farmland they entered. A beta regression model suggests that a reduction in the cultivation of preferred crops from 75 to 25% of the farmland area decreases elephant crop damage by 64%. Water availability (distance to the nearest waterhole) and the presence of pri- vate investors (mostly hunting tourism companies) were of lower importance in determining elephant crop damage. Thus, damage by elephants increased with shorter distances to waterholes and decreased in areas with private investors. However, further studies are required, particularly of the perceived costs and benefits of elephants to local communi- ties. Farm aggregation and the use of non-preferred crops that also require less water would potentially reduce ele- phant damage but would be a major lifestyle change for some local communities.
Keywords Crop damage, human–elephant conflict, local communities, private investment, Tanzania, water avail- ability, Wildlife Management Areas, woodland
Supplementary material for this article is available at
doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319000978
Introduction
et al., 2005; Fisher, 2016). African elephants Loxodonta africana have coexisted with people for millennia but the growth of human populations and the extension of agricul- ture into rangelands and forests have brought humans and elephants into direct conflict (Hoare, 1999a; Pozo et al., 2017a). Elephants frequently cause widespread damage to agriculture and water supplies, and may injure or even kill local people, who often retaliate by killing the elephants concerned (Naughton-Treves, 1998; TAWIRI, 2010; Mariki et al., 2015). As a result, human–elephant coexistence entails serious challenges for managers, local communities and elephants (Sitati et al., 2003). Crop damage (often referred to as crop raiding) is consid-
C
ered the most widespread form of damage caused by ele- phants (Hoare, 2000). Spatial patterns of crop damage by ele- phants have been associated with human population density (Newmark et al., 1994), the proportion of land cultivated (Sitati et al., 2003;Pozoetal., 2017a), topography (Smith & Kasiki, 2000;Walletal., 2006), proximity to settlements and protected areas (Hoare, 1999a), androadnetworks(Sitati et al., 2003), among others. Elephant movements are determined by the availability and distribution of water and food (Grainger et al., 2005;Harrisetal., 2008). Elephants are particularly at- tracted to ripe food crops (Chiyo et al., 2005), making small farms surrounded by savannah highly vulnerable to crop damage (Graham et al., 2010). Elephants do not damage all crops equally, and some are usually more affected than others (Naughton-Treves, 1998;Walpole et al., 2004). Direct feeding represents themain source of crop damage but uprooting and trampling are also common (Gross et al., 2016). Some studies have determined elephant preferences for crops, in terms of the amount taken per unit area planted at a regional scale (Walpole et al., 2004), the frequency of crop damage events over each type of crop (Naughton-Treves, 1998), or the abso- lute amount taken of each crop type (Malagu et al., 2013). The enthusiasm for private investment in, and man-
MARÍA MONTERO-BOTEY,ALFONSO SAN MIGUEL and RAMÓN PEREA (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0002-2206-3614) Departamento de Sistemas y Recursos Naturales, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria s/n. 28040 Madrid, Spain. E-mail
ramon.perea@
upm.es
Received 7 December 2018. Revision requested 2 May 2019. Accepted 16 August 2019. First published online 19 November 2020.
agement of, nature reserves (notably in East and Southern Africa) is an innovative and powerful force for social disrup- tion in rural areas (Hutton et al., 2005). For example, South Africa, Botswana and Seychelles National Parks receive a large proportion of their recurrent funding from tourism (Hanks, 2003, Buckley et al., 2012; Rylance et al., 2017). Some of these tourism enterprises contribute considerably to conservation in public–communal protected areas and
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 747–754 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000978
onflict between people and wildlife has been recog- nized as a global conservation issue (Woodroffe
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