Massive and energy-hungry, elephants face real challenges in navigating their landscapes. New research using over two decades of GPS data reveals they make surprisingly strategic decisions to conserve energy, choosing flatter, food-rich terrain and avoiding rough ground, especially when moving quickly.
These findings not only reshape our understanding of elephant intelligence and adaptability but also provide crucial guidance for conservation strategies that must consider energy efficiency, individual behavior, and a rapidly changing climate.
The Energy Demands of Elephant Life
Life as an elephant comes with big challenges. These enormous herbivores, weighing several tons, need to eat large amounts of low-calorie vegetation every day. But their size also means that moving around to find food requires a lot of energy. In the vast and often harsh environments they inhabit, every step comes at a cost.
Understanding how elephants move across the landscape is crucial for effective conservation, especially as habitat loss and human activity increasingly threaten their survival. Yet until recently, the main factors driving their movement patterns remained unclear.
Tracking Two Decades of Elephant Movement
Now, a new study led by researchers from the University of Oxford, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena sheds light on this question. Using GPS tracking data from 157 African elephants gathered over 22 years (1998–2020) in northern Kenya, the team analyzed how elephants navigate their environment. The data was provided by Save the Elephants, a UK-registered conservation organization based in Kenya.
Key Findings:
- Elephants strongly prefer landscapes with lower movement costs, with 94% of the elephants studied avoiding steep slopes and rough terrain. This suggests they are aware of their surroundings and make cost-benefit decisions to choose the most energy-efficient paths.
- Elephants actively select areas with higher vegetation productivity, with 93% indicating a preference for resource-rich environments.
- Water sources play a role in where elephants choose to go, but individual elephants can respond differently. Some remain close to water sources, while others roam farther, showing that their movement choices are more complex than traveling to the nearest river or pond.
- Elephants moving at speed show an even stronger avoidance of difficult, more energetically costly terrain. 74% of individuals avoided costly areas when moving slowly, which increased to 87% when moving at intermediate speeds and to 93% when moving fast. This suggests the animals carefully balance effort and energy efficiency, especially during long journeys.
According to the researchers, the elephants’ behavior is comparable to birds appearing to deliberately use favorable thermal uplifts to reduce the energetic costs of flying.
Modeling the Elephant Energy Landscape
To analyze the elephant tracking data the research team employed an innovative modeling method called ENERSCAPE, which estimates the energy costs of movement based on body mass and terrain slope. By integrating these estimates with satellite data on vegetation productivity and water availability, they built detailed energy landscapes that help explain elephants’ movement decisions.
A statistical approach called step-selection functions was used to assess how the elephants chose their paths. This technique compares the locations that elephants actually visited with other nearby areas they could have chosen but did not. By doing so, the researchers identified which environmental factors play a role in elephants’ movement decisions and habitat selection.
Conservation Takeaways and Real-World Applications
These findings have direct applications for wildlife conservation, and could help guide the design of protected areas and migration corridors to reduce conflict with humans. The study also suggests that conservation strategies should account for individual differences in habitat preferences, particularly concerning water access.
The results could also help predict how elephant movements may respond to climate change, which affects both the energy costs of moving, and the availability of food and water.
What’s Next for Elephant Movement Research
In the future, the researchers aim to refine energy landscape models by incorporating additional factors such as seasonal changes, human disturbances, and the impact of climate change on elephant movements.
Co-author Professor Fritz Vollrath (University of Oxford) said: “While more detailed research is needed to fully understand how an elephant uses its habitat, this study identifies a central decision-making factor for traveling elephants: save energy whenever possible.”
Lead researcher Dr. Emilio Berti (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) added: “These new results have important implications for assessing and planning conservation and restoration measures, such as dispersal corridors, by explicitly accounting for the energy costs of moving.”
Reference: “Energy landscapes direct the movement preferences of elephants” by Emilio Berti, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Fritz Vollrath, 25 March 2025, Journal of Animal Ecology.
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.70023
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