To identify and map “elephant habitat” and “elephant corridors”,
all “forest divisions” in the landscape were sequentially surveyed.
We first define the various terms used in this paper. A “forest division”
is a legal notification whose area comprises lands (typically
forests or grasslands) administered by the forest department, as
well as government land leased for other purposes such as plantations;
the area of a forest division we report here is determined
from official records and GIS analysis of maps. Elephant habitat
is further split into two categories – “elephant distribution area”
refers to contiguous natural habitat within the overall boundaries
of forest divisions that show elephant presence but may include
rarely used or inaccessible rocky and steep terrain, while “effective
elephant habitat” would exclude such inaccessible land within
the contiguous matrix. We have not determined effective elephant
habitat for individual forest divisions, a task that would require
a much finer resolution survey and sampling in a landscape of
complex topography (though we make a crude estimate for the
landscape based on the literature). Elephants may also range in
natural habitat outside the forest divisions but these areas (usually
small) are not factored into our estimations. An “elephant corridor”
is defined as a relatively narrow strip of habitat that provides
a passage for elephants to move between two larger expanses of
habitats; a corridor is thus a bottleneck for elephant movement over
the larger landscape