Land use drives differential resource selection by African elephants in the Greater Mara Ecosystem, Kenya.

ABSTRACT: Understanding drivers of space use by African elephants is critical to their conservation and management, particularly given their large home-ranges, extensive resource requirements, ecological role as ecosystem engineers, involvement in human-elephant conflict and as a target species for ivory poaching. In this study we investigated resource selection by elephants inhabiting the Greater Mara Ecosystem in Southwestern Kenya in relation to three distinct but spatially contiguous management zones: (i) the government protected Maasai Mara National Reserve (ii) community-owned wildlife conservancies, and (iii) elephant range outside any formal wildlife protected area. We combined GPS tracking data from 49 elephants with spatial covariate information to compare elephant selection across these m

SUBMITTER: Wall J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10832223 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature