Elephants have lost almost two-thirds of their habitat across Asia, the result of hundreds of years of deforestation and increasing human use of land for agriculture and infrastructure, a new study has found.
The Asian elephant, listed as endangered, is found across 13 countries in the continent but their forest and grassland habitats have been eroded by more than 64% — equating to 3.3 million square kilometers of land — since the year 1700, researchers said.
The study found that the greatest decline in elephant habitats was in China, where 94% of suitable land was lost between 1700 and 2015. That was followed by India, which lost 86%. During this time, logging, road-building, resource extraction and deforestation ramped up, and farming became more intense on land that might otherwise have hosted wildlife.
"We observed that in some places, like Thailand and China, the major losses occur following the 1950s. The colonial era had already introduced large-scale plantations in South Asia, but these later changes came from large-scale agriculture," she said.
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