Introduction and Description:

 Sri Lanka, an island roughly the size of West Virginia (25,300 sq. mi.) carries a human population (19.2 million, 2000 estimate) exceeding that of New York State and a wild elephant population of around 3000-4000 individuals.  While some 10-15% of the island’s land area has come under conservation status (National parks and reserves), these protected zones account only for approximately one third of the elephants natural ranges. A main approach to elephant conservation in Sri Lanka, as in much of the rest of Asia, has been to attempt to restrict elephants to conservation areas.  However, in the face of the intense drought impacts plaguing the region these past years, conservation areas alone, necessarily limited in size and composition, are facing great difficulty sustaining large populations of mega-herbivores such as the elephant.  Indeed, artificially maintaining high elephant densities in conservation areas, by translocating and restricting elephants to them, has caused major disturbances to those very reserves. The well-being of elephant populations in such areas are, and will become increasingly dependent, on the ability of wildlife managers to understand the dynamics of and effectively manage such areas and the adjoining resource zones affecting them.  

We propose to explore the relationships between climate (temperature and precipitation), habitat (vegetation and water), and elephant ecology (habitat affinity and use) in southeastern Sri Lanka to provide elephant mangers there with information and spatial methodologies that aim at improving both short-term and long-term elephant conservation management. We will develop a set of textual and geospatial databases designed to be integrated and employed both by our partners within the region as well as by other in-country resource managers and conservation scientists. We see this as a first step in building a more sophisticated systems model for assessing increasingly long-term scenarios of the responses of habitat and elephant ecology to seasonal climate forecasts, first within the study area and potentially across a broader range of the Asian elephant. The project we believe will serve as a pioneering example of how climate knowledge can be integrated into wildlife management strategies.

Immediately we will explore whether six-month rainfall predictions can be meaningfully linked to drought dynamics and be used to inform and help determine appropriate management interventions to prevent or mitigate crises. Such interpolative capabilities could have important management implications in focusing asset utilization, budget prioritization (e.g. deployment of specialized personnel) and further research efforts. The proposed preliminary Seed Grant work will allow us to generate testable hypotheses and predictions concerning elephant responses to climatically driven habitat affects. Our longer-term hope is to create a climate-habitat-elephant model for Sri Lanka elephant managers and leverage additional funding opportunities for broader testing and implementation.