Heterogeneity in African savanna elephant distributions and their impacts on trees in Kruger National Park, South Africa

Though elephants are a major cause of savanna tree mortality and threaten vulnerable tree species, managing their impact remains difficult, in part because relatively little is known about how elephant impacts are distributed throughout space. This is exacerbated by uncertainty about what determines the distribution of elephants themselves, as well as whether the distribution of elephants is even informative for understanding the distribution of their impacts. To better understand the factors that underlie elephant impacts, we modeled elephant distributions and their damage to trees with respect to soil properties, water availability, and vegetation in Kruger National Park, South Africa, using structural equation modeling. We found that bull elephants and mixed herds differed markedly in their distributions, with bull elephants concentrating in sparsely treed basaltic sites close to artificial waterholes and mixed herds aggregating around permanent rivers, particularly in areas with little grass. Surprisingly, we also found that the distribution of elephant impacts, while highly heterogeneous, was largely unrelated to the distribution of elephants themselves, with damage concentrated instead in densely treed areas and particularly on basaltic soils. Results underscore the importance of surface water for elephants but suggest that elephant water dependence operates together with other landscape factors, particularly vegetation community composition and historical management interventions, to influence elephant distributions.