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Long-term perspectives reveal differing impacts of elephant on elements of canopy shrub community
Conference presentation

Long-term perspectives reveal differing impacts of elephant on elements of canopy shrub community

M Landman, David S Schoeman, A J Hall-Martin and G I H Kerley
Southern African Wildlife Management Association (SAWMA) Symposium: Reconciling the contradictions of Wildlife Management in southern Africa, 2014 (Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 31-Aug-2014–03-Sep-2014)
2014
url
http://www.sawma.co.za/images/SYM2014_Final_programme_and_abstracts.pdfView
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Abstract

Environmental Science and Management Ecology elephant conservation management canopy shrubs
The conservation management of elephant focuses on identifying and mitigating the extent and intensity of impacts on biodiversity. However, variation in the intensity of impacts between elements of biodiversity is seldom explored, which limits our ability to interpret the scale of the impacts. Our study quantifies >50 years of impacts in the succulent thickets of the Addo Elephant National Park, contrasting hypotheses for the resilience of the canopy shrubs (a key functional guild) to elephant with those that argue the opposite. We also assess the impacts between elements of the community, ranging from community composition and structure to the structure of individual canopy species. We show the vulnerability of the canopy shrubs to transformation as the accumulated influences of elephant alter community composition and structure. The pattern of transformation is similar to that caused by domestic herbivores, which leads us to predict that elephant will eventually bring about landscape-level degradation and a significant loss of biodiversity. While we expected the canopy species to show similar declining trends in structure, providing insight into the response of the community as a whole, we demonstrate an uneven distribution of impacts between constituent elements; most of the canopy dominants exhibited little change, resisting removal. This implies that these canopy dominants might not be useful indicators of community change in thicket, a pattern that is likely repeated among the canopy trees of savanna systems. Our findings suggest that finding solutions to the so-called 'elephant problem', requires a broader and more integrated understanding of the mechanisms driving the changes between elements of biodiversity at various spatial and temporal scales.

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