Humans and elephants are living together
Pioneering study finds 42% of Sri Lanka being the habitat of both ‘Co-existence’ model the only way forward
The cat, nay the elephant, is out of the bag! A majority of wild elephants live in areas where men, women and children live and have done so for a long time.
This is fact and not fiction, dispelling long-held contrary expert views, the Sunday Times learns, while also reinforcing the conclusion that the only viable option or win-win situation is a human-ele- phant ‘co-existence’ model.
These facts have been established through the first-ever countrywide evidence-based study in Sri Lanka which has also yielded the first-ever Asian elephant distribution map in the world.
The study titled ‘First country-wide distribution survey of the endangered Asian elephant: Towards better elephant conservation and management in Sri Lanka’ has been published in the prestigious peer-reviewed ‘Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation’ on February 6. It is freely accessible on the web.
The study team, from the Centre for Conservation and Research ( CCR) headed by Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, divided the country into 2,714 grids, of 25 square kms each. They then fanned out across the country on motorcycles and four- wheel drive vehicles, visiting each and every 25 sq km grid and asking questions from three long- term residents in each grid to get right the overall mapping of where wild elephants live. The survey was carried out from 2011 to 2015.
To get the ground situation, at each interview the researchers asked the people a crucial question: Do you have wild elephants in your neighbourhood within 1 to 2 kms of your home?
Of course, the questioning of the people was not carried out blindly and Dr. Fernando cites cities like Colombo or Kandy where such a query would be ridiculous. Here, what the researchers did ask people around 60 years of age or older was whether they have known or heard of wild elephants being in these areas in living memory or earlier. This had helped them to gather the history of the area with regard to wild elephants for about 60 years.
The answers, not hearsay, have led to important revelations:
Wild elephants live in a large area -- 60% (more than half) of Sri Lanka and are not at all limited to Protected Areas (PAs) alone.
People are resident in 82% of Sri Lanka.
The 18% of Sri Lanka without resident people consists of Wildlife and Forest Department PAs and most of them have elephants.
When taking the 60% of Sri Lanka where wild elephants roam, only 30% of it is in PAs, with the balance 70% being outside the PAs, in areas where humans also live.
“This is a lot more than what we believed or expert opinion touted with a lot of conviction,” stresses Dr. Fernando about the survey findings.
The study had found that earlier, about 60 years ago, there had been wild elephants in 75% of Sri Lanka and that they had lost about 16% of their range, while re-expanding into about 1.4% of their former range during that period. So the net change of ranging ground for the elephants has been a loss of about 15%.
“People either said that there were wild elephants in their areas earlier but not now, while others indicated that ‘elephants had been there, then vanished but came back again later’,” he explains.
Such a range loss, it is learnt, indicates a declining elephant population, as opposed to the popular belief that their numbers are increasing. This is because the number of animals of a species that can survive is directly related to the extent of range they occupy.
In the near future, Dr. Fernando and his team are hoping to set up a database with mapping of the elephant range for the public to access on the web.
“We will need a few months to do this,” he adds.