Elephant Conservation
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Elephant Conservation
Subject – Environment
Context – Preventing Forest loss on private land can aid elephant conservation: Paper
Concept –
- Elephants prefer areas close to forests, with high vegetation cover and low human population densities.
- Preserving forest cover on private land can aid elephants to travel between habitats, in turn, helping to conserve their increasingly isolated populations.
- Connectivity is critical for the Asian elephant, India’s Natural Heritage Animal. They range widely, sometimes over the space of hundreds of kilometres, to meet their immense food and water requirements.
- Identification of corridors for the Asian elephant can potentially aid the movement of other animals, such as tigers or hog deer, as well.
About Elephants
- Asian Elephants:
- There are three subspecies of Asian elephant which are the Indian, Sumatran and Sri Lankan.
- The Indian subspecies has the widest range and accounts for the majority of the remaining elephants on the continent.
- Global Population: Estimated 20,000 to 40,000.
- IUCN Red List: Endangered.
- Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972: Schedule I.
- CITES: Appendix I
- African Elephants:
- There are two subspecies of African elephants, the Savanna (or bush) elephant and the Forest elephant.
- Global Population: Around 4,00,000.
- IUCN Red List Status:
- African Savanna Elephant: Endangered.
- African Forest Elephant: Critically Endangered
- CITES: Appendix II
