Browsing by Author "Hirvonen, Hanna"

The African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) as a renowned “ecosystem engineer” modifies its habitat by sometimes destroying woody vegetation. Their destructive effect intensifies during the dry seasons, when they form larger herds and seek to consume woody plants, especially near permanent water sources. If this happens season after season in a restricted area, such as a wildlife reserve, the tree cover is reduced. Since elephants tend to make smaller trees to fall more easily than the larger ones, this “elephant problem” harms the regeneration ability of the ecosystem in a long run, even turning savannas into grasslands. With less and less trees available, elephants and other fauna in conservation areas could end up being at a fatal risk. Multi-scale vegetation structure can be studied with airborne (ALS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Although both types of LiDAR have been applied in studies on trees, most of the ALS studies concern biomass and none of the TLS research cover elephants. Tree structure on the individual tree level can be modelled using TreeQSM modelling that has not yet been applied in savanna vegetation. This study can be considered pioneering as it attempts to provide answers to these two study questions: (1) How does tree density derived from airborne laser scanning data correlate with elephant density, elephant path proximity, and river proximity? (2) How do tree architecture metrics derived from terrestrial laser scanning data correlate with elephant path proximity and river proximity? The study area is Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary, a small privately-owned wildlife conservancy in southeastern Kenya that falls within an area scanned with ALS in 2014. The vegetation of the reserve has been changing for many decades, and the latest changes in the vegetation cover are visible from satellite images. The “elephant problem” near the area was scientifically discussed already in 1960’s, so their damage may have been taking place for a long time. There are two datasets from the area for estimating elephant occurrence (elephant density based on elephant observation points and elephant track proximity based on elephant tracks) and one for the proximity to the river. Tree density was calculated based on detected treetops from the ALS point cloud and its correlations between the elephant predictors and the river proximity was analyzed. TLS measurements of 72 individual trees of Vachellia tortilis and Newtonia hildebrandtii were made in January and February 2020 in Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. 53 were successfully modelled with TreeQSM. The correlations between the tree structure metrics and elephant density, elephant track proximity, and the river proximity were analyzed. The values for crown ratio, the metric that correlated significantly with the elephant track proximity were predicted to assess the meaning of the results in practice. The overall findings from both analyses (ALS and TLS) may suggest that trees in Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary may have suffered from elephant damage, since lower tree density correlates with both the elephant density estimates and the elephant track proximity. The trees scanned with TLS seem to be somewhat larger in closer proximities to the elephant tracks, while smaller trees are more able to survive in areas further away. Quantifying elephant damage in more detail, such as torn or hanging branches, was still not achieved by this study. Regardless, it can be concluded that there is enough foundation for further research on the important issue, the phenomenon that can turn dangerous to many species that were supposed to be protected.