Deforestation driving negative human-elephant interactions in Western Ghats, says study

Research shows deforestation in Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve leads to increased human-elephant conflicts, threatening wildlife and habitats.

Around 15% of the Asian elephants’ former habitats in and outside the protected areas in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve (NBR) and the Bhadra Tiger Reserve have been lost to agriculture and changing land-use between the 1960s and the early 2000s, according to a research paper published in Tropical Conservation Science, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal.

Even more worryingly, data on negative human-elephant interactions in the study area, when overlaid with data on deforestation in the region, showed that 624 of “human-elephant interactions”, including crop-raiding and elephant attacks between 2008 and 2011, occurred close to or in areas where deforestation was the most severe, indicating a correlation between the incidents and deforestation.

The paper is titled ‘Deforestation Increases Frequency of Incidents of Elephants (Elephas maximus)‘, authored by Jean-Philippe Puyravaud, Sanjay Gubbi, H.C. Poornesha, and Priya Davidar. It assessed deforestation in the NBR and the Bhadra Tiger Reserve in Karnataka between 1960 and 2004 and compared these areas with 624 incidents of negative human-elephant interactions between 2008 and 2011.

The comparison of the past and recent land cover indicated that a total of 4,023 square kilometres of forests and 2,738 square kilometres of scrub, amounting to 6,761 square kilometres of elephant habitats, have been destroyed. Concurrently, the agricultural village mosaic in the region witnessed an increase by 7,123 square kilometres, mostly in non-protected areas encompassing 6,266 square kilometres and 857 square kilometres in Kerala and parts of Gudalur in Tamil Nadu.

The study also found that the annual rate of deforestation between 1960 and 2004 was 0.85% every year. Mr. Puyravaud, one of the authors of the paper, said the deforestation also led to the severance of corridors that connected tiger reserves in the NBR with those in Kodagu and Nagarhole districts of Karnataka. “The extensive forest cover that existed in these regions in the 1960s, mostly on private land, has been severely transformed,” the paper said.

Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Puyravaud said there remained a narrow corridor for the wildlife to move between the NBR and the Bhadra Tiger Reserve. There were other corridors, but they were less preferred by the wildlife because they were located on a more hilly, less traversable terrain. “As deforestation has also led to some habitats being destroyed, the corridors that do exist are narrow and that pass through regions with high human density, potentially leading to more negative interactions with people in the surrounding areas,” he said.

The incidents, called “conflicts” by some experts, provoked by elephants in the studied region are to some extent the result of the landscape having been transformed for intensive agriculture. The change seemed to have left isolated elephant populations struggling with the transformation. Despite landmark legislation for preserving tree cover such as the Indian Forest Act, 1927, the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, or the Preservation of Trees Act, 1984, the landscape connectivity of the largest Asian elephant population and the largest Bengal tiger population in the world have been severed, the authors noted.