Demographic Circumstances and People’s Sentiments towards Elephants in the Human–Elephant Conflict Hotspot Villages of Keonjhar Forest Division in Eastern India
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Overall, I think this gives important insight into the level of HEC in this region of India and some potential initiatives that could help alleviate the situation.
There is a mix of British English and American English that needs to be addressed.
Specific comments are:
L30 citation 3 is a website that no longer works. There must be a better citation that can be used here.
L33 Rather than forced towards, I would suggest 'drawn towards'
L34 is the mating opportunity not just an artefact/consequence of the elephants having to use the resources of this area?
L50. What does 'mosaicked' mean?
L54 What happened in year 2019, I think you need to explain why data was only collected in these years.
L73 is it really a major source of income, or is the majority subsistence farming in the region?
L79 to save the reader reading the paper that you base the classification of 'highly prone to HEC' please explain how this was determined.
L81, '2000 and 2018' elsewhere you have 2018 and 2020 I would suggest you use the same order throughout.
L83-85., again clarification on how these villages were selected is pivatol to the paper
L86 clarify if this is human or elephant populations
L106 'with 133 mines' perhaps rephase to being mined at 133 different sites
L106 5 NH as only used once on the paper no need for abbreviation, use the longhand.
L108 cite the papers/documents that told you there are 60 elephants in the area
L119 as you address both elephants and humans in this paper you need to specify the which species the populations are referring to.
L128, clarify what conventional jobs are
L131 sentence needs clarifying so the reader understands when the demographic data was collected.
L138, is it just headmen? More personal interest.
L170 I think you may mean the correlations between all... as collinearity is a special case when two or more variables are exactly correlated.
L180 Do you mean the answers were too vague? Fuzzy is generally used to describe something physical such as wool.
L189 what do you mean by 'viz'
L195, you say annual average but you do not clarify if this is per village, per household?
L120 how was severity measured?
L271 is paddy a crop or is it the rice that is a crop in a paddy field?
L275 no need for the word reasonably
L308 after first comma there is a capital letter than needs to be changed
L338 'can reach out in no time to help the species' consider changing to can react in a timely manner to assist
L344 I understand you did more than one analysis, thus analyses
L361 experts suggestions
L377 needs to be completed.
Author Response
Thank you very much for recognizing significance of our study. The revised manuscript was carefully proof read and corrected for grammar and language errors, specifically the mentioned error. All of the comments were addressed and each edited lines were tracked:
L30:
The website; https://elephantconservation.org/ from which we had quoted the “surrounded by 20% of the world’s human population” is functional. However, we have also included article citations to support the information.
L33:
This correction was made in the manuscript as suggested.
L34:
Thank you for pointing that out. Mating has been omitted from the description.
L50:
Yes, the word was replaced with “scattered” which gives a clearer meaning. The modified line is as follows; “…only 22% of them survive within protected areas and the rest are mostly spread out among multipurpose reserved forests which are scattered with human inhabitations, agricultural land and transportation networks”
L54:
The intended meaning was “during the period between years 2018 and 2020”, to show the extent of HEC. We have corrected the sentence to give a clearer meaning, as follows;
“These overlapping regions demand sharing of resources between people and elephants, which tends to aggravate conflicts to such an extent that around 1400 people and over 300 elephants have been killed as a result of HEC from 2018 to 2020.”
L73:
Yes, they are involved in subsistence farming, thank you for pointing this out. We rephrased the line by omitting the said phrase. “For instance, women in India were equally affected by HEC as men and women in Uganda and Kenya were less supportive to coexistence than men because of their higher involvement in agriculture, which was now being threatened by HEC.”
L79:
Yes, through spatial analysis of conflict occurrence in our previous study (Tripathy et al. 2021), we identified around 45 villages which were frequently subjected to elephant attacks between 2013 and 2018, and hence these villages were classified to be under the high risk zone for human elephant conflict. As per your suggestions the authors do realize that this description of the previous study is essential and has been incorporated into the manuscript, Line 133 - 145.
L81:
The idea intended was “More than 500 villages distributed within the seven forest ranges of the district were affected from 2000 to 2018”. This modification has been done in the manuscript. For the spatial analysis of conflict occurrence in our previous study (Tripathy et al. 2021) we used compensation records from year 2000 to 2018, as per their availability. However, apart from this through literature we have found annual average human and elephant mortalities between the years 2018 and 2020, since more recent data were available in the case of these annual average numbers.
L83-85:
Yes, this description has been included in the manuscript.
L86:
The line has been modified according to the suggestion. “(1) evaluate the demographic situation (such as male/female (human) population, literacy and source of income)…”
L106:
The manuscript sentence has been modified accordingly. “The Keonjhar forest division is rich in mineral resources like iron, manganese, chromite, magnesite and quartize mined at 133 different sites.”
L106:
The line was corrected to; ” There are five national highways and has a rail link of 118 km, which facilitates transportation and communication.”
L108:
The relevant papers have been cited in the revised manuscript
L119:
This suggestion has been accommodated while revising the manuscript and the species has been specified in the instances where the term population is used.
L128:
Here what we meant by conventional jobs was; industrial workers, household workers, etc. other than the employment depending on cultivation activities. We have rephrased the line in the manuscript to improve clarity.
L131:
To avoid the lack of clarity the respective paragraph has been re-arranged and more detailed description related to the data collection procedure has been added in the revise manuscript Line 142. The demographic data was collected from the Keonjhar district census report 2011, which was the latest available census data at the time of our study.
L138:
We’ve modified the sentence to give a clearer idea because it was not just the village headmen who participated in the interviews. During the period our survey was scheduled Owing to the constraints imposed during the pandemic, it was difficult to get in person responses from every HEC victim in the 45 high HEC prone villages. As per the circumstances we had to resort our strategy to conducting telephone interviews of village headmen, personnel from community development centers, women welfare societies, labor groups and youth clubs of the respective villages, who can act as representatives of the people in the victimized villages and express their collective sentiments towards elephants on behalf of the whole village.
L170:
Actually, the correct word is multicollinearity. It’s the basic steps before every regressing analysis. We excluded the higher multicollinearity values as it reduces the precision of the estimated coefficients, which weakens the statistical power of regression model.
If the meaning is still confusing, then please let us know, we can exclude the sentence as its a basic step.
L180:
The suggestion was accepted and the word “fuzzy” was replaced with “vague”
L189:
Here we used the abbreviation viz (short for the Latin word videlicet), which is generally used as a synonym for "namely", "which is", or "as follows" to introduce examples to illustrate our point. For more clarity we have replaced it with “such as” in the revised manuscript.
L195:
The line in the revised manuscript was modified to say “the annual average for HEC incidences was around 55 cases per village”
L120:
Although the line number you’ve mentioned is not indicating the exact line in the manuscript, we believe that you’re asking about the severity related to landscape use. However, going by the suggestions of the other reviewer we have decided to exclude this section from the study due to certain limitations.
L271:
The line was modified to “This is indicative of the prominence of agricultural activities in the HEC hotspot regions where croplands, of which most are paddy fields, were the dominant land use type”
L275:
As per the suggestion, the word “reasonably” has been removed from the sentence.
L308:
Yes, this error was noted and the correction has been made.
L338:
The respective line has been modified accommodating the above suggestion; “….the forest department can react in a timely manner to assist and chase the elephants back to the jungle….”
L344:
The correction has been done.
L361:
Yes, the line was edited to say “Following the experts’ suggestions…”
L377.
Thank you for noticing and pointing it out. The relevant sections have been completed in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 2 Report
Review of „ Demographic circumstances and people’s sentiments towards elephants in the human-elephant conflict hotspot villages of Keonjhar forest division in eastern India.”
I did carefully read the submission and think that it is worth for publication in diversity.
I have some general comments and more specific suggestions outlined below:
Very detailed and good introduction to the topic.
Consider using a multivariate analyis
Present results in table format and by cateogry
Discuss the results related to covariables
Introduction:
28 Elephas maximus or the endangered Asian elephants – put scientific name in brackets
31 [4,5] please use citations for Asian Elephant range and not too general
72 The are other publications in the forest elephant range related to attitudes that might provide further inside – e.g. Nsonsi et al
79 Use wording introduction the study objectives before talking about the study site
Methods
94 where? Eastern India, state???
104-106 can you indicate the mines and roads on the map?
107 Where does the information about the number of elephants come from?
Figure 2: I don´t think you should put attitudes results into that figure, but instead roads, mines etc…
132 55 cases per year?
133 could you indicate these incidences on a heat map?
135 unclear
138 unclear how participants were selected
Results
193-196 should be rather in the method section
196-200 can this information be put into a table?
202 unclear what build-up means
202-206 why is that relevant? Are you intending to work on a risk map? You might want to expand that analysis as the current description has limited usage only
213 – it is unclear how these results related to the title! I was under the impression that you talk about attitudes/sentiments, but now you talk about the degree of HEC – this is misleading. Is this about HEC perceptions, incidences or what? Also is the statistical analysis appropriate for that? What are the categories? Wouldn´t a multi-variate analysis be more appropriate?
222-229 While I understand that the results are also shown in the figures, the authors need to summarize them in the text – I thought that is the main topic of the study! Figure 1 is not a good place to present these results. Include them in a table format as also mentioned above.
230-251 The authors should present results according to the demographic categories, and not only as a general result summing up all responses.
Results
Given the need to expand on the presentation of results indicated above, the authors need to discuss that according to the various categories, otherwise the insights of the study are very limited. Based on these new results the authors should rephrase their discussions.
Author Response
Thank you very much for finding the potential significance of this study and for the detailed feedback on each section of the manuscript. All the comments and suggestions are addressed and modification has also been tracked in the revised manuscript.
Introduction:
L28:
The relevant correction has been done in the manuscript as instructed. The corrected line now reads; “The endangered Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are now surviving in only around five percent of their original habitat range surrounded by 20% of the world’s human population.”
L31:
Two new citations which are specific to the Asian elephant range were added to the revised line.
L72:
We found that the literature recommended by the reviewer was very relevant to our study and could indeed provide better perspective. Also, a few ideas have been adopted from this paper and included in the introduction of the revised manuscript Line 87-89
L79:
Thank you for the suggestion, this paragraph was rearranged according to the recommendation.
Methods
L94:
Yes, the required details have been added to the manuscript. The corrected line now reads; “The study was conducted in the Keonjhar forest division, in the state of Odisha in Eastern India, located between 21°1′ N–22° 10′ N and 85°11′ E–86°22′ E and covers an area of approximately 6,038 km2.”
L104-106:
As recommended, mines and roads have been displayed in Figure 1 of the revised manuscript.
L107:
This line in the revised manuscript has been updated with the relevant citation.
Figure 2:
This suggestion was accepted and has been accommodated in the revised manuscript Figure 1. The sentiment results were illustrated on a separate map (Figure 2).
L132:
Yes, the line in the manuscript was modified to make that clear. The corrected line now reads; “The annual average HEC incidences for each village was around 55 cases and a majority of these incidences involved crop-raiding, followed by house damage.”
L133:
A detailed conflict distribution map along with the number of high risk villages has already available in our previous paper (Tripathy et al.2021). So we did not repeat or include the same map in this study rather we cited it [47].
L135:
To avoid the lack of clarity the respective paragraph has been re-arranged and more detailed description related to the data collection procedure has been added in the revise manuscript Line 133 - 145.
L138:
Through spatial analysis of conflict occurrence in our previous study (Tripathy et al. 2021), we identified around 45 villages which were frequently subjected to elephant attacks between 2013 and 2018, and hence these villages fell under the high risk zone for human elephant conflict. Owing to the constraints imposed during the pandemic, it was difficult to get in person responses from every HEC victim during the period our survey was scheduled. As per the circumstances we had to refine our survey to telephone interviews of village headmen, personnel from community development centers, women welfare societies, labor groups and youth clubs of the respective villages, who can act as representatives of the people in the victimized villages and express their collective sentiments towards elephants on behalf of the whole village.
Results
L193-196:
These lines have been shifted to the method section as per the suggestion of reviewer.
L202:
The term built-up was used in reference to buildings, developments or settlements. For better clarity we have replaced the term “built-up” with “human settlements”.
L202-206:
In our previous study (Tripathy et al. 2021), we estimated the regions under high risk of HEC. So, in this manuscript we are not intending to work on the risk mapping which has already been covered in the previous work, rather our aim was to simply portray the LULC factor or the dominant landscape features in the study area.
However, going by what you’ve pointed out we do understand that there is no direct relevance of this to the outcome of the study. Initially we believed that, as we were exploring the demography, additionally, how people utilize the land will also add some value to the study. For instance, through the demographic analysis we found that most of the people in the conflict prone areas were involved in farming, hence we speculated that the dominant land use in the hotspot regions must be crop land. To support this assumption, we carried out this analysis. But, as you indicated and the authors also now agree, this analysis needs more relevance and obvious objectives, therefore we decided to exclude this portion from the manuscript.
L213:
We accept and appreciate that you’ve pointed out the possibility of other interpretations of the title. We have addressed this lack of clarity to the best of our ability by elaborating on the data collection methods in the revised manuscript in a manner which clearly distinguishes the aims of the study.
As also indicated in the title there were two separate, yet key aims of our study. First, was to find the demographic factors underlying HEC incidents. Through the findings related to this objective we try to show the potential demographic variables and their relationship with conflict incidents.
Moreover, as also discussed in our introduction previous literature hints that the demographic factors which are drivers of conflict occurrence can also affect people’s sentiments towards elephants and coexistence. Therefore, we believed it was essential to allocate a study objective to identify these demographic variables that influence conflict occurrence and analyze the nature of the relationship/influence between these demographic factors and conflict occurrence, parallel to studying local people’s sentiments towards HEC, elephants and co-existence. Recognizing these demographic variables will help stakeholders (such as policy makers, conservationists) to check the practicality/feasibility of implementing certain mitigation strategies or management plans in these regions.
Regarding the suitability of the statistical analysis used in the study we would like share our few points. Since dependence and interdependence are two techniques of multivariate analysis and given our assumption that HEC incidences are dependent on some of the demographic factors, we chose dependence methods (when one or more of the variables are dependent on others). This method looks at cause and effect of two or more independent variables to explain or predict the value of dependent variables. Multiple linear regression is a dependence method which looks at the relationship between one dependent variable and two or more independent variables and explain the extent to which each independent variable has a linear relationship with the dependent variable.
Similarly, to find the potential demographic factors, we used a stepwise automatic procedure, where a generalized linear model was used, which is an extension form that allows the specification of models where the response variable may follow different distributions other than normal. In every step a variable was excluded from the set of demographics (explanatory) variables based on AIC criterion. So, these consist of a series of sets designed to identified the useful independent variables to include in regression models, which is similar to multivariate analysis as well.
Backward elimination regression was used because it begins with a model that contains all variables under consideration and then starts removing the least significant variables one after the other until no variable is left in the model or until a pre-specified stopping rule is reached.
L222-229:
Thank you for pointing out this short coming in the manuscript. The main results were also presented in a table (Table 2) and a separate figure was dedicated to illustrate the distribution of people’s sentiments (Figure 2).
L230-251:
Although, we do understand the significance of presenting results according to demographic categories, we cannot classify based on demographic categories because we did not survey each individual household to know their perceptions in the 45 villages, rather we collected the overall sentiments from certain representative groups of people in the 45 conflict prone villages including headmen of the villages, personnel from community development centers, women welfare societies, labor groups and youth clubs of the respective villages, who can act as representatives of the locals in the victimized villages and express their collective sentiments towards elephants on behalf of the whole village.
For instance, it was a general practice of the villagers to come and meet the village headmen to discuss about losses from elephant attacks. Hence, key village personnel like the village headmen are capable of providing reliable information on the villagers’ perceptions towards elephants.
Discussion
In order to accommodate the result tabulation suggestion of the reviewer, we have tried to present the main findings of the study in table format and also extended our discussion to incorporate these changes.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
I am very pleased with the corrections that you did and congratulate you for your work.
