The Rurban Elephant: Behavioural Ecology of Asian Elephants in Response to Large-Scale Land Use Change in a Human-Dominated Landscape in Peri-Urban Southern India

Srinivasaiah, N and Vaidyanathan, S and Sukumar, R and Sinha, A (2022) The Rurban Elephant: Behavioural Ecology of Asian Elephants in Response to Large-Scale Land Use Change in a Human-Dominated Landscape in Peri-Urban Southern India. [Book Chapter]

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Abstract

An impetus for growth and development in India, with the second largest human population in the world, has resulted in rapid changes in land use across the country, especially over the last two decades. While the land area under agriculture has only slightly increased, there have been significant changes in the shift from single-cropping to double- or multiple cropping every year and an overall increase in built-up areas. We assess the impacts of such transformations on the lives of India’s largest land mammal, the Asian elephant, at a time when about 400 people and 150 elephants succumb annually to human–elephant conflict across the country. Although elephants generally prefer forested habitats, the increased availability of nutritious crops and forest cover in the form of agroforestry plantations outside protected forests has led them to move extensively across peri-urban areas and successfully adapt to this novel anthropogenic ecological regime. We discuss these unique, inexorable processes of synurbisation, adaptation in a nonhuman species to human-induced change, with a particular focus on how the successful exploitation of rurban agricultural resources has allowed for the appearance of spatially and temporally flexible behavioural innovations that, in turn, impact the life-history strategies of a threatened elephant population in a peri-urban region of southern India.

Item Type:	Book Chapter
Publication:	New Forms of Urban Agriculture: An Urban Ecology Perspective
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Springer Nature.
Keywords:	Behavioural flexibility; Human–elephant conflict management; Movement ecology; Peri-urban agriculture; Synurbisation
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	15 Jun 2023 09:04
Last Modified:	15 Jun 2023 09:04
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/82012

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