Borneo’s elephants prefer degraded forests, a new study finds

Conservation-minded planners often pick places with the fewest signs of human impact for protection, and, across the tropics, pristine rainforests with the tallest trees often rise to the top of the list. But safeguarding specific so-called “degraded” areas as conservation targets is also important, especially when they constitute the best habitat for threatened species. A new study supports that conclusion: It confirmed that Bornean elephants (Elephas maximus borneensis), considered by some scientists to be a subspecies of the endangered Asian elephant, actually prefer disturbed forests with shorter trees to denser primary forests. “There are obviously many benefits of protecting primary forests,” said Luke Evans, an ecologist with Danau Girang Field Centre in Malaysia and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, and lead author of the paper. “We’re just saying that, for elephants, it’s not particularly useful.” The study found that Bornean elephants preferred degraded forests with shorter canopies. Photo by John C. Cannon/Mongabay. Evans and his colleagues used a decade’s worth of data on the movements of 29 elephants fitted with GPS tracking collars around the forests of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. Past research has led scientists to speculate that disturbed forests might be more suitable for elephants than primary forests. In degraded forests, elephants can more easily knock around the smaller trees to get to their foliage, and gaps in the canopy allow light to reach the forest floor, stimulating the growth of understory plants that help sate their big appetites. For this study, the researchers also…

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