Changing landscapes drive dietary diversity shifts in Asian Elephants in Peninsular Malaysia

Rapid changes in land-use patterns bring significant challenges to wildlife conservation, particularly for large herbivores, such as Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Despite the impact of land-use change being widely studied globally, its effect on the dietary patterns of umbrella species, such as the Asian elephant, remains limited. Therefore, this study employed high-throughput trnL DNA metabarcoding to assess dietary shifts in Asian elephants across two distinct landscapes: 1) northeast Peninsular Malaysia, a landscape undergoing large-scale development and logging (development-logging landscapes, DLL), and 2) southern Peninsular Malaysia, an oil palm-dominated landscape with remnant forests without major logging or land-use changes (oil palm-forest landscapes, OPFL). We analysed 60 individual faecal samples, yielding 1,737,956 high-quality sequences for the DLL and 1,454,807 for the OPFL. Analysis of frequency of occurrence (FOO) and relative read abundance (RRA) revealed a significant variation in elephant diets between the two landscapes, with the DLL exhibiting higher richness and diversity than the OPFL (458 identified taxa vs. 389, respectively). This study highlights the dietary flexibility of Asian elephants, demonstrating their ability to adapt to environmental changes by modifying their feeding habits to available food resources. These findings deepen our understanding of the dietary ecology and food preferences of Asian elephants in Peninsular Malaysia, offering valuable critical insights for developing food banks as a strategy to mitigate escalating human-elephant conflict.