Ecology of Asian Elephant Elephas maximus in a multi use human dominated landscape of Baleshwar and Betnoti habitat Odisha India

Abstract

The Human Elephant Conflict (HEC) is a serious problematic situation in global level. In Odisha the large scale destruction of forest habitats and changes occurred in land use patterns leads to Human Elephant Conflicts. During my study period from October 2018- February 2022 revels various facts regarding wild Asiatic elephant. The pattern of migration increased from Jharkhand to Baleshwar via Mayurbhanj since 2010. The study involves in accumulating various behaviour noticed during the study period. This study reveals that 29% of incidences of depredation happened with the immediate forest frontier area of 0-100m, where 24 % of cases within 100-300m, the prevailing confront occurred in between 19% (300-500m), 16% (500-700m) and 12 % (700- 1000m). The house damage root cause is searching of crops, salt and handia (rice brew) and the distance from forest wards also a dependent factor which shows significance difference (X2=26.427,df- 8; P). newlineThe overall composition of vegetation found that 98 species were tree (52.97%), 70 were herbs (37.84%), 8 were climber species (4.32%), 7 species were under shrub (3.78%) and only two were Orchids (1.08%). Non-forest plant species, most species were consumed from Cucurbitaceae family (N=8 species, 44.44%) followed by Solanaceae (3, 16.67%); Brassicacea, Fabaceae (2 each, 11.11%) and the least species were consumed from Amaranthaceae, Malvaceae, Myrtaceae (1 each, 5.56%). The dung boli analysis shows 22 species of seeds present in their collected sample. The use of noise, drumming, firecrackers, fireballs, and spotlights were the intervention techniques for elephant deterrents that were most frequently used. Both lost some of their effectiveness when combined with noise (interactions between noise and fire, noise and spotlight, noise and fences). The study shows out of 300 cases, only 110 (36.6%) have applied and they also claimed that the recovery period is too slow and 190 (63.33%) never applied for the amount due to delay and not to satisfied to their level of damaged.