Borneo’s elephants prefer degraded forests, a new study finds

Conservation-minded planners often pick places with the fewest signs of human impact for protection, and, across the tropics, pristine rainforests with the tallest trees often rise to the top of the list.

But safeguarding specific so-called “degraded” areas as conservation targets is also important, especially when they constitute the best habitat for threatened species. A new study supports that conclusion: It confirmed that Bornean elephants (Elephas maximus borneensis), considered by some scientists to be a subspecies of the endangered Asian elephant, actually prefer disturbed forests with shorter trees to denser primary forests.

“There are obviously many benefits of protecting primary forests,” said Luke Evans, an ecologist with the Danau Girang Field Centre in Malaysia and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, and lead author of the paper. “We’re just saying that, for elephants, it’s not particularly useful.”

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