Sample designs are indeed hard to find in the literature.

For maxent, you need only a limited number of presence points. I would say aim at about hundred; more is not necessarily better (see my pertinent papers). It depends on the size of your research area and range of the elephant how many transects of what dimensions you would need to obtain the required number. Presumably you deal with "forest" elephants. However, my papers are on savanna elephants in Africa, but I am familiar with elephants in Sri Lanka and Thailand and forest elephants in South Africa.

Transects to sample, presumably dung and/or footprints (or also hairs?), should of course be unbiased. Depending on your terrain form, this implies either random or systematic selecting the start or central site of your transects. In mountainous terrain, random sampling is often practically impossible. In case of elephants, you may use elephants paths as your transect.

In my papers, you may find different transect designs adapted to research question and area. Keywords: Gorillas, Pinus mugo, carbon stock, taungya, Chromolaena.

After reading up, you surely have additional queries.

Dear Hnin,

As Professor Van Gils says, MaxExt only requires pairs of geographical coordinates for the spatial analysis. So now you just have to find the optimal way to determine the location of these animals.

Here is a reference that might help you:

Chapter Estimating Density and Abundance of Elephants from Sightings...

Regards

Hein Van Gils Thank you, sir. I'm working on forest elephants in Myanmar and the forest in my study area is not easy to perform line transects for dung pile. I will reach out your papers. Thank in advance.

Pedro Perez Cutillas Thank you so much. I will carefully read the paper you mentioned . Thank in advance.