Human–elephant coexistence 751


TABLE 2 Summary of the beta regression model averaging (n = 8 models) for the factors affecting crop damage by elephants. Pseudo R2 for the full model = 0.302.


Predictors


Relative abundance of preferred food Presence of investor


Distance to water supply


Importance1 1.00


0.41 0.29


Estimate ± SE −0.0001 ± 0.0004


3.0633 ± 0.6527 −0.4068 ± 0.3609


z


4.693 1.127 0.406


P


,0.001 0.260 0.684


1The sum of the AIC weights across all models where the fixed effect occurs (Table 3), ranging from0 (minimumimportance) to 1 (maximum importance).


TABLE 3 Model selection (n = 8 models) for the beta regression models of crop damage by elephants. Models are ranked by AIC. Intercept


Presence of investor


−2.1150 −2.0020 −2.0730 −1.9530 −0.7320 −0.6137 −0.6871 −0.5602


−0.4046 −0.4120 −0.4898 −0.5049


Distance to water supply


−0.0001 −0.0002


−0.0002 −0.0003


Preferred food relative abundance df Log likelihood AIC


3.098 3.036 3.067 3.000


3 4 4 5 2 3 3 4


16.483 17.097 16.555 17.192 7.447 8.184 7.595 8.378


−27.0 −26.2 −25.1 −24.4 −10.9 −10.4 −9.2 −8.8


0.77 1.86 2.58


16.07 16.60 17.78 18.21


ΔAIC AIC weight 0.00


0.425 0.289 0.168 0.117 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000


FIG. 2 Predicted proportion of elephant damage to crops in relation to (a) the proportion of preferred food (area covered by preferred crops divided by the total area of each farm), and (b) the distance to the water supply for each farm. The curves show the fitted values of the beta regression models (Table 3).


average, farms with water supply points ,250 mfromthe farm had .30%of their area damaged (Fig. 2b). Area da- maged by elephants was lower on farms with investors (mean per cent of area damaged 20.53 ± SE 3.32%; range 12.42–74.03%) compared to those without investors (mean per cent of area damaged 33.50 ± SE 3.06%; range 8.59–35.51%).


Discussion


Our results showed strong differences in elephant food selection across the 18 crop types. These differences


corroborate other evidence that elephants do not damage all crops equally (Naughton-Treves, 1998; Walpole et al., 2004). Many of the highly preferred crops, such as sweet po- tatoes, bananas and onions, even though they are found in many villages, are not the main crops cultivated in the area. Our findings regarding food selection are in agreement with those presented by Naughton-Treves (1998) for Kibale National Park, Uganda, where banana was the most pre- ferred crop followed by sweet potato. However, Walpole et al. (2004) reported sorghum and finger millet, followed by maize, to be the most preferred crops in the Serengeti


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


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