elephant_farmers: Elephant Agricultural Use Metrics in Mara-Serengeti Ecosystem

In ecoteach: Educational Datasets for Ecology and Agriculture

Elephant Agricultural Use Metrics in Mara-Serengeti Ecosystem

Description

A dataset containing agricultural use metrics for 66 elephants in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem in Kenya and Tanzania. The data were collected to characterize crop use tactics by elephants and to understand how elephants interact with agricultural areas. The dataset includes metrics such as mean agricultural use, maximum use from a moving average, and the difference between mean and max use. These metrics were used to classify agricultural use tactics for each elephant using Gaussian mixture models. The dataset contains individual-year agricultural use metrics, space use, and elephant metadata, with tactic classifications for both lifetime tracks and individual years.

Usage

elephant_farmers

Format

A data frame with 202 rows and 17 variables:

subject_name

Individual elephant ID

tactic.aggregate

Tactic classification for lifetime GPS track of individual: Rare, Sporadic, Seasonal, or Habitual

season.year

Year cuts (cut date April 1 of each year)

tactic.season

Tactic classification for the associated year: Rare, Sporadic, Seasonal, or Habitual

year.begin

Data start date for a given year

year.end

Data stop date for a given year

n.fixes

Number of GPS relocations for an individual in a given year

year.mean

Mean agricultural use for a given year

year.max

Maximum agricultural use from a 90-day moving average for a given year

year.delta

Difference in mean and max agricultural use for a given year

year.mcp.area

MCP homerange for an individual in a given year

mu.daily.disp

Mean daily displacement for an individual in a given year

subject_sex

Sex of the individual (male or female)

subject_ageClass

Age class of individual (young adult or mature adult)

centroid.dist.meters

Distance from centroid of homerange to agriculture (meters)

tactic.prev

Tactic of the previous year (NA if no previous tactic could be confirmed)

tactic.change

Whether an individual changed tactics ("Changed") or stayed the same ("No change")

Source

Hahn, Nathan (2021). Elephant agricultural use metrics in Mara-Serengeti ecosystem. Dryad Digital Repository. \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.5061/DRYAD.RN8PK0PBN")}

Examples

# Load the dataset
data(elephant_farmers)

# Basic exploration
head(elephant_farmers)
summary(elephant_farmers)

# Examine distribution of tactics by sex
table(elephant_farmers$subject_sex, elephant_farmers$tactic.season)

# Compare agricultural use metrics across tactics
boxplot(year.mean ~ tactic.season, data = elephant_farmers, 
        main = "Mean Agricultural Use by Tactic",
        ylab = "Mean Agricultural Use")
        
# Examine tactic changes over time
# Count how many elephants changed tactics vs stayed the same
table(elephant_farmers$tactic.change, useNA = "ifany")

# Look at relationship between distance to agriculture and tactic
boxplot(centroid.dist.meters ~ tactic.season, data = elephant_farmers,
        main = "Distance to Agriculture by Tactic",
        ylab = "Distance (meters)")

ecoteach documentation built on June 29, 2025, 5:08 p.m.