Predicting Elephant Crop-Raiding with Machine Learning to Inform Conservation Planning: A Case Study Comparing the Performance and Tradeoffs of GeoAI Algorithms in Northwestern Zimbabwe

Katherine Elizabeth Markham , Sergio Bernardes, Ferrel V. Osborn, Marguerite Madden, Malvern Karidozo, William R. Langbauer, Angela Yao, Andrew Grundstein, Roger Parry

Human–elephant conflict (HEC) is a persistent socio-environmental challenge arising from the intersection of wildlife ecology, land use change, and development. African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) come into conflict with humans when space and resource needs overlap. Patterns of HEC are complex and the relationships between drivers and conflict are not always linear. In northwestern Zimbabwe, south of the city of Victoria Falls, conflict arises as the rainy season comes to a close and crops mature. In this study, we demonstrate how Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) can be integrated into environmental decision-making to model and precisely mitigate conflict.

We combined geospatial datasets with machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict crop-raiding occurrence. Using over 700 crop-raiding conflict locations, we identified anthropogenic and natural factors as model predictors. We compared random forest, support vector machine, and neural network approaches within a geospatial pipeline and evaluated model performance. Results from different ML algorithms reveal nonlinear and moderately complex patterns within our dataset. The likelihood of conflict increases with closer proximity to protected areas and further from anthropogenic activity. When predicting conflict, multi-layer perceptron neural networks achieved the highest accuracy (95.5%), outperforming support vector machines (76.3%), random forests (81.5%), and deep neural networks (69.0%). While it does not provide insight into individual predictor contributions, the multi-layer perceptron neural network model outperformed all others on testing data, suggesting it will scale to other regions. Beyond prediction, our work emphasizes the promise of GeoAI as a decision-support tool. As agricultural area expands and the spatial and resource needs of humans and elephants increasingly overlap, the accurate and targeted conflict prediction provided by GeoAI models can facilitate mitigation methods that are locally salient, evidence-based, and cost-effective. Our work provides transferable insights for integrating GeoAI into environmental management to address human–wildlife conflict and other spatially complex environmental challenges.