Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
Elephant species are today found in a breathtaking range of environments that can range from extremely seasonal and arid to aseasonal and wet. This chapter on space use examines how resource gradients, especially water and forage availability, influence habitat preference in the many different ecoregions of Asia and Africa. Spatial and social considerations are intimately tied together, as revealed by studies of elephant movements that yield ever more detailed understanding of what exactly elephants are selecting for. Once again, evidence points to important trade-offs between meeting nutritional requirements and safety, with elephant populations subject to sensitive dependence on social and cultural knowledge transmitted across generations. However, present-day elephant distributions and space use offer a limited view of their historic use of particular ecosystem types and geographic regions, given the constraints now imposed by anthropogenic land-use change and habitat fragmentation.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.