Conservation of threatened and conflict-prone large mammals is challenging in the Anthropocene because of increasing competition with people for space and resources (Dirzo et al., 2014). The Endangered Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is no exception; it suffered a 95% reduction in the historical range and now lives in highly fragmented landscapes of tropical Asia (Sukumar, 2003; Williams et al., 2020). The species continues to be threatened by the loss, fragmentation, and degradation of habitat, poaching for ivory, and other related conflicts with humans (Menon and Tiwari, 2019; Williams et al., 2020). Currently, elephants and people coexist in various land uses and human population densities, where Human-elephant Conflict (HEC) is one of the most pressing threats to elephant conservation (Goswami et al., 2014; Shaffer et al., 2019). Local and marginalised livelihoods also suffer as HEC poses livelihood consequences, including crop raiding, infrastructure destruction, disruption of daily routines, impacts on psychological well-being of people, and even harm or death to humans, and elephants (Madhusudan, 2003; Barua et al., 2013; Sampson et al., 2021). Crop raiding and related risks to life and rural livelihood are major obstacles to public support for elephant conservation, and affected people respond to conflict by injuring or killing elephants or implementing management interventions to control elephant movement, such as fences and trenches (Obanda et al., 2008; Snyder and Rentsch, 2020). Consequently, elephant population is declining; thus, mitigating HEC is critical to the success of conservation efforts for elephants and well-being of local communities (Woodroffe et al., 2005; de la Torre et al., 2021). HEC can occur for a variety of reasons, including behavioral traits of the species due to the polygamous mating system (Sukumar and Gadgil, 1988; Chiyo et al., 2011), inadequate conflict mitigation measures (Lenin and Sukumar, 2011; Shaffer et al., 2019), attraction to cultivated crops that are known to be richer in macronutrients and mineral salts than wild plants, the availability of water in farmlands adjacent to forests (Chiyo et al., 2005; Rode et al., 2006), nutritional stress caused by a decline in the quality and nutritive value of natural forage (Sukumar, 1989). All of these lead to increased encounters with elephants. Fragmentation and degradation of habitat and increase in elephant populations in response to protection, and their dispersal to new habitats are also major reasons for conflict (Chartier et al., 2011; Lenin and Sukumar, 2011). This is particularly true for India because the country supports about 60 percent of the wild population, and the remaining populations are mainly restricted to protected areas surrounded by agricultural landscapes (Karanth et al., 2010). Due to India’s high population density (382 persons per
square kilometre), even in rural areas, negative interactions between humans and large mammals are anticipated to worsen (Karanth et al., 2010; Prasad, 2012). In India, elephants are reported to kill over 400 rural people annually; conversely, around 100 elephants loose their lives due to continual conflicts. Hence, HEC remains a major hurdle in elephant conservation efforts and associated human life and livelihood loses. Several traditional and advanced methods have been implemented to reduce and prevent HEC situations. commonly used traditional techniques range from crop-guarding, chasing elephants by making noise (shouting, drum-beating, firecrackers), installation of physical barriers such as electric fences and elephant-proof trenches for physical exclusion, use of acoustic and light-based deterrents, use of agriculture-based deterrents, capture and relocation, and compensation and insurance schemes (Lenin and Sukumar, 2011; Shaffer et al., 2019). Technological advances have resulted in development of various other methods to address the problem such as early detection and warning, radio collaring of problem elephants to track their movement, cognitive IoT system with intelligence techniques, Wireless Integrated Sensor Network (WISN) based boundary intellect system (Kumar and Raghunathan, 2014; Anni and Sangaiah, 2018; Sangaiah et al.,2020). Studies also recommend incorporating individual variation, cognition, and behaviour into conflict resolution techniques (Mumby and Plotnik, 2018). However, there are significant differences in farming methods, resource availability, humanelephant interactions, environmental conditions, habitat characteristics, and elephant behaviour across the species’ distribution range (Kumar et al., 2010; Karenina et al., 2018; de la Torre et al., 2021; Ram et al., 2021). Hence, the key questions that need to be answered to develop evidence-based HEC mitigation strategies appropriate for local circumstances are: what are the seasonal, spatial and temporal trend of HEC situations and the ecological and social drivers leading to it? What attracts elephants beyond park boundaries in different seasons? What methods do local people use to mitigate elephant impacts, and what their opinions about currently using and new mitigation methods to reduce conflict? However, landscape-specific information on specific scenarios of conflict, and the perception of people towards it is lacking in many regions which is a handicap to design locally appropriate and effective conflict mitigation strategies (Blake and Hedges, 2004; Thekaekara et al., 2021). Understanding people’s perceptions towards elephants is also important for the assessing and restoring tolerance because social factors shape the attitudes and perceptions towards conflict and conflict animal at regional scales viz. ethnicity, values, shared history, and, cultural beliefs. Moreover, human-wildlife conflicts are often manifestations of underlying human–human conflicts, such as between authorities and local people, or between people of
different cultural backgrounds and people’s perceptions and
attitudes towards landscapes (Dickman, 2010; Ghosal et al., 2015; Thekaekara et al., 2021). Hence, social scientists argue that effective approaches for managing human-elephant coexistence require interdisciplinary integration of social science expertise with conservation biology, which unfortunately is not the case (Thekaekara et al., 2021).
The Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot harbours about 25% of
the wild population of Asian elephants. The Ghats hold a minimum population of 10,000 elephants distributed in four landscape complexes (Baskaran, 2013). The Brahmagiri-Nilgiri Eastern Ghats elephant landscape (Nilgiris hereafter) supports over 57% of the elephant population in the Ghats, which is the largest single breeding population of the species at its highest density anywhere in Asia (Gajah, 2010). Nilgiris is prone to seasonal fluctuation in resource availability, where a large stretch of dry forests reduces the Anoop et al. 10.3389/fcosc.2023.1142325 Frontiers in Conservation Science 02 frontiersin.org carrying capacity for elephants during the peak of the dry season (Sukumar, 2003; Anoop and Ganesh, 2020). Due to the distribution of swamps and perennial streams, the Wayanad plateau on the western side of the Nilgiris supports forage availability throughout the year. Hence the plateau is an important dry season refugia for elephants in the Nilgiris. However, around 70 percent of the plateau’s forests have been lost to agriculture and settlement in recent decades, leading to a matrix of forest and agriculture. The remaining remnant in Wayanad is also degraded due to management activities and forestry operations by the state forest department, the spread of invasive plants, livestock grazing, and poor regeneration of native plants. Forest loss in Wayanad modifies the habitat heterogeneity in Nilgiris by reducing the size of the species’ key dry season foraging area and disrupted several seasonal migration paths caused by human population growth, expansion of farmlands and other anthropogenic pressures (Nair et al., 1978). This has led to increasing use of human-developed landscapes in Wayanad further accentuating HEC (Anoop and Ganesh, 2020). In the Western Ghats, Wayanad is an ideal location for an interdisciplinary understanding of HEC, which interaction is socioecologically prosaic due to the year-round availability of perennial, annual, commercial and non-commercial crops, various levels of habitat fragmentation and degradation, diverse human resource cultures, strict implementation of wildlife and forest protection laws, and a region of high human-elephant conflict. HEC here deserves an interdisciplinary inquiry because the region also has a long history of coexistence between people and elephants (Anoop and Ganesh, 2020; Jolly et al., 2022). To gain a comprehensive understanding of HEC in the landscape, this study integrated multiple methods such as semi-structured interviews with households and forest staff, information from compensation claims made by farmers for losses due to conflict, and the identification of individual crop-raiding elephants. Based on the above, we predict that (1) crop raiding patterns changed drastically in Wayanad in the recent past due to rise in elephant population, facilitated by legal protection and policy measures to prevent poaching, changing behaviour of elephants and people, and poor conflict mitigation measures (Sukumar, 2003; Münster and Münster, 2012); further that male elephants would mostly be involved in conflict due to sex-specific life-history strategies and adaptations to human-dominated areas (Srinivasaiah et al., 2019), (2) conflict will be high in areas close to forest boundaries, especially where it is difficult to raise barriers due to geographical constraints such as marshes and streams and therefore people living close to the forest boundary are more likely to encounter elephants, (3) the distribution of conflict is driven by the availability of highly attractive seasonal resources like jackfruit and mango in the agricultural landscape and conflict will be high during monsoon because the biomass and yield of many crops increase in this season (Rode et al., 2006) and easy for elephants to break any physical barriers because of damp soil (4) increasing conflict situation would seriously affect homestead farming and hence the food security, nutritional needs, and income of the villagers. The study contributes to growing body of knowledge on HEC in Asia, and its results have long-term implications for the landscape level management of elephants and mitigation of HEC in Wayanad and other elephant landscapes in Asia.