Fleming College

Collecting data from 15 collared African elephants and using specialized software, GIS-Applications Specialist students Vijayan Sundararaj and Yu Mui Pang quantified and compared the movements of the elephants in their home range within Kruger National Park in South Africa.

Vijay and Yu presented the resulting project, Movement Ecology of African Elephants in Relation to Habitat and River Edges, at the GIS Open House held June 25 at the Frost Campus in Lindsay. The students partnered on the project with Prof. Rob Slotow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

According to the students’ abstract, studying the movement of large herbivores such as elephants is crucial to understanding their population dynamics and survival. Animals are affected by natural edges in habitat, which play an important part in determining their movement. The students studied the distance the elephants travelled, their crossing speed in habitat edge areas as well as their movement far from edge areas.

Combing through a very large data set and extracting that data from spatial maps and statistical analysis, Vijay and Yu found evidence that elephant movement responds to predation risk and increased speed in movement is used as predation avoidance behaviour. The age of the elephants did not limit their movement. In fact, the older the elephant, the more quickly it moved from habitat to habitat, said Vijay.

“Within animal behaviour, there is a trade-off between keeping safe and getting food,” he added.

The results of the study will help park managers better understand and predict how elephants in Kruger move in different types of natural edge boundaries. This ultimately could help in developing a new management plan for the park and could potentially reduce human-elephant conflicts in surrounding areas, said Vijay.

“We’re happy with the results,” said Vijay. It brought us new insight and new analysis.”

Vijay says he took the GIS-Applications Specialist program to complement his skills as a wildlife biologist. He has a PhD in Forest Sciences and is now aiming to return to Lakehead University in Thunder Bay to use his newly-acquired GIS knowledge in his ecology research.

Yu and Vijay also plan to submit their study for publication in scientific journals such as Movement Ecology.

Sixteen groups of students in both the GIS-Applications Specialist and GIS-Cartographic Specialist programs partnered with real world clients to produce the semester-long cooperative projects.

Other projects included:

– Using GIS to analyze provincial highway collision data to identify patterns and causes of highway collisions;

– Mapping trails and parks in Lindsay;

– Designing a 3D model (animated) of downtown Peterborough;

– Mapping the watershed ecology of a lake in Quebec that is in a hyper-eutrophic state and is considered to be toxic;

– Mapping the impacts of shoreline development on Lake Trout habitat in Haliburton County.

For more information on Fleming College’s GIS programs, please visit: http://flemingcollege.ca/school/environmental-and-natural-resource-sciences.