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.