Rare pygmy elephants endangered by logging in Borneo
Rare pygmy elephants endangered by logging in Borneo
mongabay.com
August 8, 2007
Pygmy elephants are increasingly threatened by logging and forest conversion for agriculture in their native Borneo, reports a new satellite tracking study by WWF.
Researchers report that the preferred habitat for these dwarfed elephants — flat, lowland rainforests and river valleys — are some of the most sought after by developers. More than 40 percent of the total forest cover in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo has been lost to logging, plantation development, and settlement.
“The areas that these elephants need to survive are the same forests where the most intensive logging in Sabah has taken place, because flat lands and valleys incur the lowest costs when extracting timber,” said Raymond Alfred, Head of WWF-Malaysia’s Borneo Species Programme.
“However, the Malaysian government’s commitment to retain extensive forest habitat throughout central Sabah, under the Heart of Borneo agreement, should ensure that the majority of the herds have a home in the long term.”
 © WWF / A. Christy Williams. Rozelis with the collar the day after.
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The Heart of Borneo initiative — agreed upon in early 2007 by the three governments that control Borneo — seeks to conserve 240,000 square kilometers of contiguous forest on Borneo.
The new study, which WWF says is the largest ever using satellite collars on Asian elephants, “suggests that pygmy elephants prefer lowland forests because there is more food of better quality on fertile lowland soils.”
“Satellite tracking is clearly one of the most effective ways of obtaining information on wild elephants in Sabah because they spend so much time inside the forest,” said Mahedi Andau, Director of the Sabah Wildlife Department. “We now have a good idea of the home range, size and location of some individual elephant herds.”
The study found there are “probably not more than 1,000” pygmy elephants remaining in Sabah, which is home to about two-thirds of Borneo’s elephant population. A reserves in Kalimantan — the Indonesian part of Borneo — appears to be small and too fragmented to support a viable population for the long term.
WWF says that while elephants can survive in sustainably logged forests they will not persist in oil palm plantations, currently one of the greatest threats to Borneo’s rainforests.
Satellite Tracking of Borneo’s Pygmy Elephants -June 2005 — June 2006 PDF
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This article is based on a news release from WWF