Habitat suitability and connectivity inform a co-managed policy of protected areas networks for Asian elephants in China

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1 Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China
2 Kunming College of Life Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China
3 Central Department of Zoology, Institute of Science and Technology, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27397v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Conservation Biology, Ecology, Natural Resource Management
Keywords
Conservation policy, corridor, economic development, human-dominated landscape, MaxEnt
Copyright
© 2018 Huang et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Huang C, Li X, Khanal L, Jiang X. 2018. Habitat suitability and connectivity inform a co-managed policy of protected areas networks for Asian elephants in China. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27397v1

Abstract

Enlarging protected areas (PAs) network is critical to ensure the long-term viability of Asian elephants from habitat fragmentation and loss. While challenges are raised in the strictly government-managed policy of PAs networks due to the difficulties in persuading participation of stakeholders and meeting habitat requirements of the elephants. This study hypothesized that a co-managed policy is more plausible than the strict policy to enlarge PAs network for Asian elephants in a “developing” world. We identified the suitable habitat for Asian elephants using the maximum entropy modeling approach (MaxEnt) and examined the socio-economic context of the habitat. The hypothesis was supported by our results: (1) Asian elephants prefer forest matrix with multiple land use (50% forest cover) rather than interior of large forest and roam in proximity of human habitations (mean distance 1.85 km); (2) suitability and the level of economic development of the habitats are negatively correlated (p = 0.04). Additionally, we provided an empirical study on corridor designing for the study area in China.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Presence of Asian elephant and corresponding variables

raw data

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27397v1/supp-1

Pseudo-absence of Asian elephant and corresponding variables

raw data

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27397v1/supp-2