Reciprocal regulation between rural settlement expansion and human-elephant conflict in China’s wild elephant range

Abstract

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) and its socioeconomic impacts are a pressing global issue. Accurately quantifying HWCs and their interaction with residential development is crucial for rural revitalization and biodiversity conservation efforts. This study investigates the interplay between rural residential expansion (RRE) with human-elephant conflict (HEC) in southern Yunnan Province using high-accuracy yearly land use/land cover data and Asian elephant accident data. A piecewise regression along with several metrics, including expansion intensity, rate of rural residential land, and residential density, were employed to analyze the spatial-temporal change characteristics of RRE. Then, a geographical detector and a bivariate spatial autocorrelation model were used to reveal the driving mechanisms of RRE, with particular emphasis on the spatial relations between RRE and HECs. The results indicate that HECs had a significant negative impact on RRE, exhibiting higher expansion intensity and rate of rural residential land in non-HEC areas than in HEC areas. High spatiotemporal consistency between accelerated RRE and intensified HECs occurred from 2010 onwards, which aligns with the year when the trend of settlement area expansion changed. RRE activities and ensuing land use conversions led to increased occurrences of HECs, which negatively affected the RRE. Compared to HECs, topography and locational factors exhibited a secondary effect on RRE activities. The findings underscore reciprocal feedback mechanisms between RRE and HECs and the elevated risk of adverse interactions between humans and elephants within the range of China’s wild elephants, providing theoretical support for coordinating conservation initiatives for Asian elephants with rural revitalization in the border areas of Southwest China.

Keywords

Geographical detector / Human-elephant conflict / Land use/land cover / Residential land / Spatiotemporal characteristics

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Beibei Xu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Software, Investigation, Data curation. Xin Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Data curation. Jiejing Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Investigation. Hui Fan: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

We declare that we have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41971239), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (Grant No. 2019QZKK0402), Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Project on China-Laos Cross-border Asian Elephant Habitat Quality Assessment (Grant No. 102169221100000009022), and the Graduate Research Innovation Project of Yunnan University (Grant No. 2021Y368).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.08.014.

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