PONE-D-22-17386Defragmenting Southern Africa’s elephant populationsPLOS ONE

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"Support for this study was provided by Billiton, Conservation Foundation Zambia, Conservation International’s southern Africa’s Wildlife Programme, the Conservation Lower Zambezi, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Mozal Community Development Trust, the National Research Foundation, the National Postcode Lottery of the Netherlands, Peace Parks Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, the University of Pretoria, the World Wildlife Fund (SARPO; Mozambique; SA), the Walt Disney Grant Foundation, and the Wildlifewins Lottery. Elephants Without Borders was funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Jody Allen, the Woodtiger Fund, the Thomas C Bishop Charitable Foundation, the James and Deborah Burrows Foundation, and the Zoological Society of San Diego. "

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"Support for this study was provided by Billiton, Conservation Foundation Zambia, Conservation International’s southern Africa’s Wildlife Programme, the Conservation Lower Zambezi, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Mozal Community Development Trust, the National Research Foundation, the National Postcode Lottery of the Netherlands, Peace Parks Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, the University of Pretoria, the World Wildlife Fund (SARPO; Mozambique; SA), the Walt Disney Grant Foundation, and the Wildlifewins Lottery. Elephants Without Borders was funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Jody Allen, the Woodtiger Fund, the Thomas C Bishop Charitable Foundation, the James and Deborah Burrows Foundation, and the Zoological Society of San Diego. We acknowledge the in kind logistical support of South African National Parks. This research was sanctioned and supported by the Botswana Dept. of Wildlife & National Parks, Direcção Nacional de Areas de Conservação, the Namibian Ministry of Tourism & Environment, the Malawian Wildlife Dept., the South African National Parks, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife of South Africa, and the Zambian Wildlife Authority. We also thank the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust for telemetry data from Gonarezhou National Park.  Ifaw continues to support our ongoing research initiatives.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: PONE-D-22-17386: Defragmenting Southern Africa’s elephant populations

One of the main strengths of this work lies in the amount of telemetry and environmental/anthropogenic data collected over space and time by the authors, although as they are presented in the methodology, they do not explicitly indicate which research questions/objective they intend to answer with these data. For example, lines 97-106 are describing data acquisition from various sources but which objectives (which should have been clearly stated in the introduction section) are they addressing?

The statement in the “lines 110, 143, 164&254” for example, should have been used to guide the formulation and write up of this manuscript-understanding suitable habitats for elephants in southern Africa and how artificial barriers from different areas are limiting their connectivity and how to respond to these barriers/challenges, use lessons from these to set best practices that are context based?-unfortunately the paper as it stands, it does not reflect that this is the case.

One major flaw of the paper is the inconsistencies in writing and presentation of information-in the course of reading this, it was difficult to follow clearly from the title, introduction, methods, what exactly authors were trying to address….for example, one would ask, what is the objective of the paper? Is it about what the titles states? If so, one would have expected authors to set the scene and the aim of the paper, right from the introduction, however, this seems rather missing.

Reservations in the specific sections of the paper

Title

Despite the being rather ambitious, it would rather have some more action words on how realistic this can be given the current rate of local and global changes, that include among others climate and human population change and associated pressures

Abstract

The abstract seems a little twisted into a more descriptive than a conventional scientific way of presenting a research work with clear aim, methods results and conclusion…

Introduction

It would be good to see this section explaining explicitly the clear goals of the paper so readers can follow how this resonates with the subsequent sections. Also, authors could mention and describe sooner in the manuscript a sentence about the elephants populations being presented in this paper and cite the relevant figure (e.g. Fig.2) as well as a mention of the major threats that each of this is facing and the way defragmenting process would help address/mitigate these threats

Lines 80-84: It would be good to state if these hypothesis and based on which assumptions? And how are they linked with the objectives of the paper?

Methods’ section

Being a research article, it would be better to state sampling (data collection) strategy, sample size (e.g. source and number of individual elephants collared in each population, number of protected areas involved in data collection), data collection and analysis (including those other than collaring data) separately, rather than the present arrangement in the methodology section. For example, one would want to know, which sections in the “methods-lines 85-364” are methods and which ones are results? And what do all case studies in this section represent?-they are not stated anywhere in the introduction section and in the methodology it is not clear why they are being presented.

Which research question/objective do long-term telemetry data (lines 86-96) intend to answer in this paper? Is this backed up by any background hypothesis in the introduction section of the paper? These should have come a bit earlier in the introduction section of the paper so they guide the subsequent sections. For example, if questions in lines 110, 143&254 came out clearly in the introduction section, then the readers would be able to follow easily the flow of the story of this paper. Without this, it is difficult to have a meaningful interpretation and discussion of the results

What is SRTM in line 99?

There is no clear link between the subsequent sections of the paper (after introduction section) and the title of this paper. For example, not sure how one would expect elephants to cross fenced areas and how this would be resolved by telemetry data to achieve the ultimate goal which is reconnecting the populations.

I have looked at the manuscript and found a number of issues and problems related to the scientific clarity. Clearly the paper doesn't seem to state clear objective and rationale, and the methodology is not well formulated and implement in accordance to the title of the paper which makes interpretation of the synthesized information difficult to readers.

In view of the comments above, I am afraid that I cannot recommend this manuscript for publication in PLOS ONE.

Reviewer #2: The authors present and interesting and important topic of relevance to the conservation and management of elephants across Africa. The need for this type of analysis is clear and important due to the large spatial requirements of elephants. However, I do find that the method section should be extended so that the methods used could be replicated. Very little information is provided on some technical details such as the degrees of overlap between the layers. Some figures are also confusing. For example, Figure 3 shows for those few humans (D) cover the entire southern regions (omitting Eswatini and Lesotho and this should also be stated and the reasons as Eswatini does have elephants). If this is the underlying layer as presented, it would seem so course and poorly defined that I wonder how it can be meaningful. Also, as an example the ‘few’ category for cattle is described in a contradictory manner in the text and is also poorly defined:

Line 329-330, Page 14

Cattle are present throughout this area but at relatively low densities (5-10/km2).

Line 152, Page 7

The same pattern holds if one considers areas with high human populations (>25 people/km2) [37] and high cattle densities (>5 cattle/km2) (S2B Fig) [38].

Other details are also inaccurate or not updated. As example Banhine- and Zinave National Park in Mozambique are shown as without elephants in figure 10 but both do have elephants. The latter due to a recent translocation. Again, this classification may be due to definitions that are not well explained in the text of figure headings.

Overall, although the topic and analyses are important, the lack of clarity in terms of definitions of categories and methods, other than broadly stating how the overlap in layers were used, need more work before the manuscript can be published.

Minor Grammatical corrections:

Line 102 Page 5

‘extend’ not ‘extent’

Line 314-315, page 14

Unfortunately, high incidences of poaching place further pressures that endanger movement in several

potential connections [53].

Rewrite

Unfortunately, high incidences of poaching present a safety risk to elephants and further limit movement in several potential corridors

Line 371, page 16

Preferably change ‘infeasible’ to ‘unfeasible’

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-22-17386 Comments to Authors.docx

Mapping potential connections between Southern Africa’s elephant populations

PONE-D-22-17386R1

Dear Dr. Huang,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Bi-Song Yue, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE