Extending the Behavioral Geography within the Context of Forest Restoration: Research on the Geographical Behaviors of Northern-Migrating Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) in Southwest China

Abstract

In 2021, the northward migration of Asian elephants in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province attracted significant public attention. Exploring the behavior of Asian elephants will help to better protect this endangered species and further realize the harmonious coexistence of humans and elephants. Based on the news texts regarding the northward migration of Asian elephants, this study used network text analysis, social network analysis, and grounded theoretical research methods to explore the behavioral characteristics and internal motivations of Asian elephants during their northward migration. The results indicate that: (1) during the northward migration of Asian elephants, moving and foraging are their most frequent behaviors, and foraging may be the chief purpose of the migration. (2) Different behaviors of Asian elephants hide their behavioral choice preferences, including environmental, time, and behavioral preferences. During the migration, Asian elephants mostly move in low-altitude areas, often foraging or migrating around farmland in the afternoon or at night, returning to the mountains to rest in the early morning. Corn, rice, and other crops are their primary food; the change in their eating habits is influenced by the lack of herbs and woody plants inside the protected area. (3) The northward migration behavior of elephant herds is influenced by various factors, such as elephant population expansion, habitat change, and species migration characteristics, and the relationship between conservation and development needs to be balanced.

1. Introduction

As an integral part of the many terrestrial ecosystems, forests play an important role in maintaining biodiversity. As one of the world’s leading economies, balancing economic development and environmental protection has become an urgent issue for China to address. However, China’s rapid economic development in recent years has been accompanied by deforestation. Forest fragmentation has led to an inevitable squeeze on wildlife habitats, resulting in frequent incidents of wild animals leaving traditional habitats to enter the human activity space, conflicting with humans throughout China [1]. Strengthening the protection of forest resources is an important condition to ensure the development of forest resources. At the same time, to protect forest resources, rational development and utilization can effectively improve the use efficiency of forest resources and promote economic growth. How to balance forest conservation and development has received great attention in academia. However, little attention has been paid to the impact of forest conservation and development on wildlife behavior. As a core area of reproduction and growth, forests are essential for the survival of wildlife. Recently, a highly destructive, long-lasting, and wide-ranging wildlife incident occurred in China, arousing widespread concern worldwide [2,3]. On 16 April 2021, 16 wild Asian elephants from the Mengyang Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, China, left their traditional habitat to migrate more than 1300 km northwards, which took more than 500 days, and they passed through eight counties (cities, districts) in Yuxi, Honghe, and Kunming. The northern migration of Asian elephants has been one of China’s most destructive wildlife incidents in recent years. Most scholars believe it results from a combination of forest overprotection and habitat destruction. Therefore, it is worthwhile to pay attention to these problems and explore the hidden scientific issues behind forest conservation and wildlife behavior to provide references on striking a balance between forest conservation and wildlife protection.

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), the protagonist of the aforementioned northward migration, belongs to the order Proboscidea, the largest and most representative terrestrial vertebrate in Asia; is a key protected animal in China; and is listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Recently, China has adhered to the development concept of prioritizing conservation and has continued to increase its efforts to protect Asian elephants and their habitats. With the joint efforts of the relevant departments of the Chinese government, the conservation of wild Asian elephant populations in China has achieved remarkable results. Compared to the past 30 years, the number of wild Asian elephants has increased from approximately 150 to 300. In addition, as the Chinese government and relevant departments have focused on ecological and environmental protection, the forest coverage of the traditional habitat of Asian elephants has also been increasing each year. However, the increase in forest coverage also means that the understory shrubs and herbs have been decreasing, leading to a shortage of food sources and a decrease in suitable habitats for the elephants. Because of the mutual contradiction between the increasing elephant population and decreasing habitat, wild Asian elephants frequently enter human activity areas due to foraging, leading to frequent human–elephant conflict (HEC). Forest conservation has led to reduced and fragmented elephant habitats, creating the problem of how to protect elephants and mitigate HEC. HEC not only causes substantial economic losses but also affects and threatens the daily activities and safety of local residents, intensifying their resentment toward Asian elephants [4].

Under the background of habitat fragmentation of Asian elephants caused by excessive forest protection, how to respect the survival behavior of wild animals and mitigate the conflict between humans and elephants has become a popular issue of widespread concern in academia, the government, and the public. In recent years, many studies have evaluated the habitat suitability of Asian elephants. Habitat destruction has been found to affect the survival and reproduction of Asian elephants more than other species with smaller home ranges because elephants require large areas of habitat to meet their ecological requirements [5]. Most scholars believe that the area and distribution range of suitable habitats for Asian elephants in China are shrinking, and many elephants are in danger due to insufficient habitats [6,7,8]. HEC occurs when the habitat needs of Asian elephants and human needs intersect. HEC are is generally common in protected areas with a high human demand for natural resources [9,10,11,12]. The key types of HEC include crop damage, property destruction, and human and elephant casualties [13,14,15]. For example, Asian elephants feed on farmland due to food shortage, and pesticides on crops will harm the health of Asian elephants. In addition, farmers may hunt Asian elephants for revenge. An evaluation of the patterns and distribution of HEC can help to better understand the causes and provide reference for mitigating these conflicts. Although, there are differences in the mode and distribution of HEC in different regions, generally, altitude, topography, land-use type, population density, and distance from the protected areas are the main factors that affect the pattern and distribution of HEC [16,17,18]. HEC seriously affect human life and livelihoods, and understanding people’s attitudes toward these conflicts is crucial when designing long-term effective management policies for Asian elephants. Scholars generally agree that education, culture, wealth level, and the intensity of loss affect the local population’s perceptions and attitudes toward HEC to varying degrees [19,20,21,22,23,24].

When forests are destroyed, the animals and plants present are affected to varying degrees [25]. From the perspective of behavioral geography, this paper explores the behavior of Asian elephants during their northward migration and their relationship with the geographical environment [26]. Traditional behavioral geography is based on human beings as the basic object of study, which is inextricably linked to the long-standing prevalent anthropocentrism. Traditional anthropocentrism believes that nature and all things exist to serve and be used by human beings and that in the relationship between human beings and nature, everything must start and end with the interests of human beings. This view once influenced social practices and academic orientation. However, as environmental problems become increasingly serious, some scholars have begun to rethink the relationship between humans and non-humans, proposing new ethical concepts, such as “De-anthropocentrism” and “More-than-human” [27,28,29,30]. Under the new ethical orientation, behavioral geography should no longer be confined to humans, and its attention on non-human actors should be strengthened. Under the current background of increasingly intensified “human–animal conflicts,” behavioral geography research on wild animals is attracting increasing attention. Therefore, this study applied an expanding behavioral geography framework (Figure 1) to analyze the northward migration behavior of Asian elephants. Based on identifying Asian elephants as behavioral actors, this study focuses on summarizing the behavioral types, behavioral preferences and their relationship with the environment, behavioral consequences, and behavioral causes and further explores the inner mechanism of the northward migration behavior of Asian elephants. This study attempted to answer the following questions: What are the factors that drove the migration? What are the behaviors of Asian elephants during their northward migration? What are the behavior choice preferences of Asian elephants during their northward migration?

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Materials

After the Asian elephants migrated north, to grasp the activity route and behavior of elephant’s migration in real time, the relevant departments organized a monitoring team to monitor the elephant herd 24 h a day. The mainstream media have set up news features to continuously report the path and behavior of elephant migration. Therefore, the data in this study were obtained from the texts about the northern migration behavior of Asian elephants from well-known official news websites, such as CCTV.com, People’s Daily Online, and Yunnan.com, and the following conditions were set for screening: (1) to ensure the timeliness of the data, the relevant news texts used were from 25 March 2021, to 16 August 2021, for a total of 145 days. (2) To ensure the quality of the research data, irrelevant and repetitive contents were eliminated, and relevant texts that included the behavioral trajectories and behavioral characteristics of the Asian elephants in the process of their northward migration, as well as the cause analysis and solution countermeasures, were extracted. A total of 234 news texts were selected based on this standard, which were sorted and edited into .txt documents and used as the basis for studying the northward migration of Asian elephants.

The subject of this study is the Asian elephant herd originally inhabiting the Meng Yang Reserve in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve. The Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve has five sub-reserves where tropical and monsoon rainforests coexist. Thirty-one species of plants and 104 species of wild animals are protected inside by the state government. The reserve is rich in biodiversity and is one of the main habitats of Asian elephants [31]. However, the current distribution of tropical rainforests or tropical monsoon forests in protected areas is fragmented and can no longer support survival, reproduction, and development in Asia [32].

2.2. Methods

To conduct behavioral research on the Asian elephants moving north, the grounded theory was used to conduct the exploratory analysis of the relevant news texts. The grounded theory is a qualitative research method proposed by Glaser and Strauss in 1967, which aims to help researchers form and validate theories from original data [33]. As a research method, the grounded theory can extract meaningful categories from the original data through three processes: open coding, spindle coding, and selective coding.

(1) Open coding: the first step of the rooted theory approach is open-ended coding, in which meaning units are used as the coding units, and concepts and meanings that are similar are coded into a subcategory to operationalize the process of discovering the conceptual classes and categories from the information [34]. While coding the news texts about the migration, we repeatedly read and broke down the collected primary sources to discover the initial concepts word-by-word with an open attitude and condensed them into more generalized initial categories by comparing them with each other. Following the operational logic of open coding, 137 original statements with high relevance to the northward migration behavior of the Asian elephants were finally extracted, and 70 initial concepts and 27 initial categories were abstracted after the comparison and generalization of the statements (

Table 1. Example of open coding.

Part of the Original Data	Conceptualization	Preliminary Categorization
Asian elephants came to play in the water near Yuanjiang County, Yunnan Province	Play in the water	Play and bathing behavior
Elephants take a rest in the woodland near Longwu Town, Shiping County	Woodland, rest	Rest behavior
They frequently enter the village, causing some villagers’ crops and houses to be destroyed	Destroy houses and crops	Economic loss
Asian elephant habitat shrinks significantly, down by as much as 40%	Habitat area reduction	Habitat change

).

(2) Spindle coding: the purpose of spindle coding is to discover and establish the connection between the concept category and the category and to identify the primary category from the initial category to represent the various relationships between the parts of the data. In this study, we refined the initial categories based on open coding, analyzed the interrelationships among the initial categories, and integrated the categories with a higher level of abstraction. Eventually, the 27 initial categories formed by open coding were distilled into 11 main categories (

Table 2. Main category and corresponding category.

Main Category	Corresponding Category
Behavior type	Foraging behavior; resting behavior; moving behavior; play and bathing behavior
Behavioral preference	Foraging place selection preference; resting place selection preference; play and bathing place selection preference; movement path selection preference
Behavioral consequence	Economic loss; life impact
Migration-diffusion properties of species	Migration habit; wandering habit
Habitat destruction	Habitat change; habitat fragmentation; food source shortage
Protection of wild animals and forests	Animal protection; ecological protection
Pre-risk warning	Information tracking
Guide in danger	Road dredging; human–elephant isolation; auxiliary elephant group; departmental collaboration
Post-risk prevention	Ideological education; compensation and restoration

).

(3) Selective coding: selective coding aims to distill the core categories based on the main categories, relate them systematically to other categories, and analyze the relationships between the core categories, major categories, and other categories. In this study, through the continuous generalization, extraction, integration, and abstraction of 70 initial concepts, 27 initial categories, and 11 main categories, the logical structure between the concepts and categories was constructed, and three core categories were refined: the behavioral characteristics of the Asian elephants migrating northward, the causes of the migration, and the response measures (

Table 3. Core category.

Core Category	Main Category
Behavioral characteristics	Behavior type; behavioral preference; behavioral consequence
Causes of the migration	Protection of wild animals and forests; habitat destruction; migration-diffusion properties of species
Response measures	Pre-risk warning; guide in danger; post-risk prevention

).

In this study, we conducted content analysis with the help of ROST Content Mining 6.0 software to extract high-frequency keywords and the co-occurrence matrix of keywords (

Table 4. Examples of co-occurrence matrix of keywords.

Keyword	Moving	Foraging	Evening	Afternoon	Rest	Home	Woodland
Moving	0	4	8	4	0	2	2
Foraging	5	0	3	7	0	3	2
Evening	10	3	0	1	7	0	4
Afternoon	4	7	1	0	4	0	0
Rest	1	0	7	4	0	0	0
Home	2	3	0	0	0	0	0
Woodland	2	2	0	0	0	0	0

Note: The number indicates the frequency of co-occurrence of two keywords.

) regarding Asian elephant behaviors during their northward migration. And the keywords with the same meaning were grouped together to obtain the high-frequency keywords (

Table 5. Top 5 high-frequency keywords.

Keyword	Frequency
Moving	55
Foraging	24
Evening	20
Resting	13
Afternoon	12

).

In social network analysis, degree centrality is used to express the importance of nodes in the network [35]. This study uses point degree centrality and UCINET 6.0 software to analyze the importance of keywords in the semantic network during the northward migration of Asian elephants. Degree centrality measures the degree to which a node in a network is connected to other nodes. The calculation method of degree centrality is as follows [35]:

$$Degre{e}_i={\sum }_{j=1}^N{x}_{ij}\left(i\ne j\right)$$

(1)

where $Degre{e}_i$ is the degree centrality of node $i$; $i$ and $j$ are the nodes in the social network, that is, the corresponding keywords; ${\sum }_{j=1}^N{x}_{ij}$ is the co-occurrence count of node $i$ and node $j$.

3. Results

3.1. Behavioral Types of Asian Elephants Moving Northward

The most frequent behaviors of Asian elephants during their northward migration were movement and foraging, which occurred 55 times and 24 times, respectively. The frequency of resting behavior was 13 times. Interestingly, Asian elephants were also observed to exhibit play and bathing behaviors on several occasions during their northern migration. The frequency of play and bathing behavior was 11 times (

Table 6. Behaviors of Asian elephants and their impact on humans.

Behavior Type	Behavioral Description	Selected Relevant High-Frequency Words	Frequency
Foraging behavior	Feeding on various plants or sucking water through the trunk and putting it into the mouth	Foraging, eating, enjoying, salt, finding food, drinking	24
Moving behavior	Walking or running	Move, leave, return, descend, move south, start, arrive, cross, break in, cross the river, pass, enter the village, visit	55
Resting behavior	The body is in a state of complete relaxation, such as standing still or lying on the ground to rest	Sleep, rest, nap, lethargy	13
Play and bathing behavior	Playfulness or lowering body temperature	Playing, bathing, playing in the water, playing around	11

).

3.2. Behavioral Selection Preferences of Asian Elephants Migrating Northward

The co-occurrence matrix of keywords (Table 4) were imported into the UCINET 6.0 software to analyze the degree centrality of keywords (

Table 7. Degree centrality of keywords.

Node	Degree
Foraging	40.000
Evening	33.000
Moving	32.000
Afternoon	19.000
Rest	17.000
Home	10.000
Woodland	10.000
Morning	9.000
Corn	9.000
Corn field	7.000
Hilltop	7.000
Street	5.000
Mean	9.280

) and construct a keyword co-occurrence network (Figure 2). The points in the figure represent nodes, and the edges represent connections between nodes. The arrow represents the direction of the edge. The size of the nodes is proportional to the centrality of the point. The closer the words are to the central node core node, the stronger the connection with the central node words.

The different behaviors of Asian elephants indicate their behavioral choice preferences, including behavior preferences, time preferences, and environmental preferences. The key behavior of Asian elephants during their northward migration is foraging. According to the Table 7, the average degree centrality of Asian elephant migration behavior keywords is 9.280, and the degree centrality of 7 nodes is higher than the average. Foraging has the highest degree centrality of 40, which is the core keyword of Asian elephants’ northward migration. According to the Figure 2, Asian elephants often forage in villagers’ homes or woodlands during their northward migration. Asian elephants often rested on the top of the mountain or in the forest at noon, foraged, and moved in the afternoon or at night. The Asian elephants that moved north preferred corn, sugarcane, so corn field and villagers’ home warehouses were often their first choice of foraging grounds.

4. Discussion and Policy Implications

4.1. Discussion

According to the coding results (Table 3), it can be concluded that the northward migration of Asian elephants results from the protection of wild animals and forests, habitat changes, species-migration characteristics, and other factors driving Asian elephants to go out for food.

After leaving their traditional habitats, the behaviors of Asian elephants can be broadly sorted and summarized into four major types: foraging behaviors, movement behaviors, resting behaviors, and playing and bathing behaviors, which can be fundamentally summarized as survival behaviors. Movement and foraging occur most frequently and are the two types of behavior that have the greatest degree of impact on humans. Foraging is the primary purpose, movement is the process, and food shortage is the primary reason for the northward migration of Asian elephant herds, so to some extent, it can be said that foraging is the core behavior of Asian elephants in the process of northward migration, which is based on their basic survival needs. Related research also found elephants may spend anywhere between about 40% and 75% of their time in feeding [36]. All of their behaviors have a close relationship with the environment. During migration, to consume corn, sugarcane, and other agricultural foods, elephants frequently intrude into villages, farmland, and residential areas. Sukumar’s research also believes that in drier regions of Asia, the agricultural crops consumed by elephants are commonly corn and sugarcane [36]. The movement and migration of Asian elephants depend on the availability of natural food and water [36,37]. Therefore, elephants usually extend their foraging areas to the edges of farmland, where food and water resources are abundant [38], which leads to HEC. Asian elephants also play and bathe during their northern migration. Bathing, primarily in the form of rain showers, water baths, sand baths, mud baths, and grass baths, is one of the key ways they lower their body temperature [32]. Additionally, to help digest their food and replenish salt and inorganic substances, they often suck up inorganic nutrients in the nitrate ponds under the forest.

With the Chinese government’s increasing efforts to protect wildlife and forest resources and the improvement in public awareness of protection, the population of Asian elephants has been increasing. According to the Forestry and Grass Bureau of Yunnan Province, in the 1990s, the population of Asian elephants in Yunnan fell to approximately 150 and faced many problems, such as narrow and fragmented distribution areas, declining habitat quality, and reduced genetic diversity of the population. With increasing protection efforts, the development of the Asian elephant population has exhibited significant changes. Ac-cording to the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve Management Bureau, the number of wild Asian elephants has increased from approximately 150 to 300. In recent years, with the gradual improvement in the legal system and the strengthening of people’s awareness of protection, the Asian elephants’ fear of human beings has de-creased, and they have started to move around villages and farmland year-round, even near people, for food. Large herbivores such as elephants require extensive home range for food [39], so they require a large area of suitable habitat to meet their survival and reproduction needs. According to data from the Yunnan Provincial Online Press Office, Xishuangbanna’s forest coverage rate reached 81% in 2019. With the substantial increase in forest canopy density, the lack of light in the forest has caused some plants, such as plantains and loquat reeds, evolve into inedible woody plants. When the food quantity in the habitat does not match the expansion rate of the elephant population, it causes problems of intra-population competition and a lack of food. To solve this problem, Asian elephants must expand outward to find new habitats and gradually move toward farm villages outside the reserve to feed, leading to the potential risk of HEC.

Despite the increasing human protection of Asian elephants, the existential crisis of Asian elephants has been highlighted by the intensification of human–elephant conflicts. The practice of prohibiting all exploitation in the reserve has increased the forest cover, but it also threatens the survival and reproduction of Asian elephants to a certain extent. On the one hand, herbaceous plants naturally cannot grow well because the forest is too dense, resulting in the ground being deprived of sunlight. Furthermore, the fire-free forest management model affects the turnover rate of grasses and lianas, which reduces the food source of Asian elephants that live on herbs, grasses, and lianas. At the same time, under the influence of multiple development goals, such as agriculture and transportation, habitats that overlap with human activities are impacted by rising cash crop cultivation areas, the construction of highways, and other projects, affecting the migration and communication of Asian elephant populations. In other words, human activities continue to encroach on the living spaces of Asian elephants in different ways. For example, Asian elephants mainly live in valleys and rainforests. In the past 40 years, large areas of natural forests in the primary range of Asian elephants in Yunnan have been occupied by rubber and tea plantations. The share of the rubber plantation area expanded from 0.52% in 1975 to 12.71% in 2014, and the area covered by tea plantations increased from 8.77% to 22.01% [40]. This caused the habitat of Asian elephants to become disconnected and fragmented, thus forcing Asian elephants to leave their traditional habitats.

The general trend of regional changes in the wild elephant distribution in China is that the northern boundary of the distribution is gradually moving south [41]. Three thousand years ago, Asian elephants were widely distributed from the northernmost part of China to the Yellow River Basin [7]. However, with the development of human civilization and the intensification of economic and social activities, as well as excessive deforestation and potential climate change, the distribution of Asian elephants in China has retreated southward at a rate of 0.5° latitude per century [42]. The distribution area of Asian elephants has drastically decreased, and now they are predominantly distributed in Pu ‘er City, the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, and the Nangunhe National Nature Reserve in Yunnan Province [40]. In fact, the Asian elephant population in Yunnan has always been characterized by migration and diffusion. According to the data records, the wild Asian elephants distributed in Simao disappeared in 1976 [43]. It was not until after 1992 that the Asian elephants that moved from Xishuangbanna began to move into Simao District [44]. According to the statistics of Asian elephant accidents in 2010, 14 Asian elephants moved northward to Simao District of Puer City in 2010, and more than 20 Asian elephants moved to Jiangcheng County in Puer City in 2011. In addition, in wild Asian elephants, as herbivores, cycle feeding patterns are critical factors affecting their migration and diffusion behavior. When food reserves in a certain area reach the upper limit of food intake, Asian elephants will move to another area for food and wait until the food resources in the previous area have recovered before returning to forage [32]. This causes Asian elephants to constantly migrate and spread in search of optimal foraging sites.

Humans are not the masters of the natural world; nature is a “community of life” of humans and non-humans, and the coexistence and co-prosperity of humans and non-humans is the real, sustainable future of human development [45]. The relationship between humans and wildlife is a critical dimension of the relationship between humans and nature. Wildlife is a vital part of the natural world and deserves equal rights with humans to live, and wildlife can also move, think, and feel emotions (especially pain) [46,47]. Understanding the behavior of wild animals is a key component of human respect for the survival rights of animals. HEC is a pressing issue in major habitat areas of Asian elephants worldwide. For the past 50 years, the “human–elephant retreat” scenario has been frequently played out in Xishuangbanna, China. Human activities have contracted the living space of Asian elephants, while the migration and incidents of Asian elephants undermine the livelihood of humans, and humans and Asian elephants harm each other without any benefit to either side. In this context, balancing the survival rights of Asian elephants with the welfare of human beings is a subject that needs to be studied in depth. Given this, the summary of Asian elephants’ behavior patterns is a critical path. Based on extended behavioral geography and news reports, this study analyzes the behavior of Asian elephants during their northern migration. However, because the media do not report every detail of the elephant movement, the data in this paper cannot represent the complete migration behavior of the elephants, and it needs to be verified by other scholars’ research.

4.2. Policy Implications

The prohibition of all exploitation is the current approach to protecting nature reserves in China. However, such approach to conservation is also seen as not respecting the existing patterns of human–elephant relationships. The over-protection of forest vegetation in the reserve has also caused a lack of understory plants, which has aggravated the islanding of wild elephants’ living spaces and forced Asian elephants to enter human living and production spaces to feed. Therefore, the proliferation of Asian elephants is inevitable. Many experts and scholars believe that the HEC is an inevitable practical problem [17,32,48]. Thus, it is crucial to explore how to protect Asian elephants and to cooperate with forest conservation and forest resources development in protected areas to mitigate human-elephant conflicts, based on a comprehensive analysis and summary of the experiences and lessons from the process of Asian elephants’ migration northward.

The first goal should be to change the perception and regard of animals as cohabitants of the natural space, respect the traditional use of communities, and to build a symbiotic relationship between people and ecosystems. For Asian elephants, there is no concept of “habitat,” and their choice of habitat depends on various factors, such as food availability, habitat characteristics, predation, and competition [49]. The awareness of local people in terms of wildlife protection should be improved through wildlife protection publicity to improve their knowledge and perception toward elephants. Forest and wildlife conservation also requires considering the wholeness of people and the ecosystem, respecting the objective laws of ecosystem succession, accepting natural disasters and natural phenomena, and respecting the authenticity of the forest system.

Second, it is necessary to change the protection mode. Traditional “closed” conservation strategies can effectively protect biodiversity in nature reserves but may not mitigate the conflicts between regional development and Asian elephants’ conservation [50]. Under the eviction model, communities are mostly clustered around the reserve, and human activities outside the reserve have blocked the biological corridors of Asian elephants. Therefore, there is a current need to strengthen the protection and management of forest resources based on the ecosystem capacity, restore the original biological corridor, and restore the real and complete natural forest ecosystem. Due to the diversity of wild animal species in the reserve, different species have varying habitat requirements. Therefore, establishing the Asian Elephant National Park might be urgently needed to protect Asian elephants [31]. Furthermore, a unified protection management system should be established by integrating and optimizing the existing habitat range to further protect Asian elephants in this area.

Finally, based on traditional methods, such as strengthening the protection of food sources and restoring habitats, we should strengthen the application of modern science and technology and build a better forest monitoring system. Using digital technology, the activity track, living habits, and ecological environment of Asian elephants can be mapped in the digital world. By analyzing the digital data, scientific and accurate decision support can be provided for the monitoring and early warning of Asian elephants and their habitats in practice.