Effect of forest mosaics, water availability and landscape fragmentation on the spatial distribution of Human-Elephant Conflict: An exploratory study in the Human-impacted landscapes of Western Ghats, India.

Despite the worldwide intensifying human-wildlife conflict, there is still an incomplete understanding of how the configuration of human-modified landscapes affects the occurrence of wildlife crop raiding. Whereas often being homogeneous (in particular: monoculture farming), human-modified landscapes may also be rather heterogeneous (e.g., the mosaic patchwork of natural vegetation and various crop types). The spatial factors associated with wildlife crop raiding in heterogeneous human-modified landscapes remain largely unexplored, especially for the notorious crop raider: the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus). The objective is to elucidate ecological dimension variables that influence the presence of human Elephant conflict in a human-modified heterogeneous landscape by examining occurrences of crop depredation by Asiatic Elephants in the Western Ghats, Karnataka, India. The study was conducted in Western Ghats, India, which is a heterogeneous landscape of various anthropogenic land use types (plantations, diverse agricultural fields, water ponds, and villages), interspersed with natural forest patches. Socioeconomic data obtained through semi-structured interviews, observations, and group discussions with the forest authorities provided ecological dimension variables. The governmental financial compensation data for crop losses were analyzed to assess the spatial distribution of human-Elephant conflict (HEC). We used the land cover data from ESA Sentinel-2 imagery to generate a GIS map, which distinguishes forest type, vegetation type, water sources, and settlements along with the spatial arrangement of HEC-affected farmers. We quantified heterogeneity of land cover as the majority of land cover types occur in a buffer of 500 m radius around the farmers’ field. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to identify ecological predictors that best explained the occurrences of conflict in the study area. The relationship between the presence of HEC and landscape attributes was investigated using a logistic regression model with a binomial error structure which depicted that the presence of HEC increases with land cover heterogeneity and proximity to natural forests and decreases with the distance to settlements. Further, no correlations of HEC events were found with the proximity of the farmer’s field to water sources. For the heterogeneous human-modified landscape of Western Ghats, nearby patches of natural forests are a prerequisite for Elephant presence and crop raiding, with plantations merely acting as temporary Elephant refuge. More generally, the implication is that homogenization of the landscape (e.g., attrition of natural forest patches) would locally reduce conflict and intensify crop raiding towards heterogeneous areas containing the very last forest fragments.