Towards Coexistence with Elephant: Implications for Managing Sustainable City Using Geospatial Technology

The urban expansion has changed the landscape from forested areas to non-forested areas which have fragmented the elephant habitat. This has led the elephant to find the source of food in human settlements and cause human elephant conflict. Government plays a vital role in protecting both the needs of humans and elephants in terms of safety without negligence to wildlife conservation. To overcome these issues, the identification of HWC potential risk areas would help in land use development near forested areas in reducing conflict and encouraging coexistence with elephant. This study used a fuzzy overlay method to determine the HWC potential area and the triggering factors. Multi-types remote sensing satellite-based data were utilized; (i) land use land cover change, (ii) greenness index, (iii) Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and (iv) accessibility to river dataset. Results suggested that the fuzzy overlay has shown that the areas with proximity to water (less than 1.5 km) (R2 = 0.981, p-value < 0.001) and on a flat physical landscape (<10°) (R2 = 0.927, p-value < 0.005) would be HWC highly at- risk areas. As a conclusion, fuzzy overlay can identify the triggering factors that lead the elephant to come to human settlement and cause the HWC. The HWC potential risk estimation would be useful for the developer to develop the residential areas and to convert the forested areas into agricultural areas.