Patterns of human and elephant hardwood resource utilization

Human-elephant conflict is a central challenge to conservation with real and lasting consequences to both elephants and human lives and livelihoods. The Eastern Panhandle of the Okavango River in northern Botswana exemplifies... [ view full abstract ]

Human-elephant conflict is a central challenge to conservation with real and lasting consequences to both elephants and human lives and livelihoods. The Eastern Panhandle of the Okavango River in northern Botswana exemplifies the challenges of coexistence in social-ecological systems as elephants live amongst human settlements in a remote, rural region. Broad-scale analyses in the past have characterized landscape-scale elephant movement patterns, and socio-economic surveys and ethnographic studies have captured the challenges for people who live with elephants, but few have been able to capture the inter-connected patterns of elephant and human resource-use. Our research will focus on hardwood trees as a way to study the demands for natural resources in this social-ecological system, using the village of Mogkacha as a case study. Hardwoods are a key dietary resource for elephants, and their destruction during foraging by elephants creates dry wood that is harvested by rural residents for firewood. Hardwoods are therefore an important site of risk-reward interspecies interactions. Our research will employ interdisciplinary methods. We will conduct vegetation transects and use normalized difference vegetation indices to map resource availability as a key variable driving human and elephant movement. Elephant distribution and movement will be modeled using spoor along detection transects and GPS data from 20 collared elephants in the region. Human patterns of resource-use will be modeled using hand-held GPS units for logging tracks complemented with semi-structured interviews on resource use. These interdisciplinary methods will provide data to be mapped and analyzed using a GIS. Our expected key results will model the spatial and temporal hardwood utilization as a resource-utilization function (RUF) for humans and elephants. We hypothesize that there will be spatial and/or temporal niche partitioning that allows humans and elephants to coexist and minimize negative interactions (conflict) during utilization of hardwood resources. This will be the first study that we know of to combine both human and elephant movements in a single model to characterize the interactions between the two species. Understanding these interactions will not only provide insight into the inter-specific use of resources in the landscape, but may also provide key information for developing conflict-mitigation strategies.