Elephants reshape woody vegetation dynamics in southern African savannas at local and landscape scales

Elephants and other megaherbivores can strongly modify woody vegetation, yet their influence across heterogeneous landscapes and spatial scales remains poorly resolved. Here, we combined remotely sensed time series of vegetation height (2000–2022) and woody cover (2015–2025) with elephant population counts from 34 reserves across eight southern African countries to investigate the relationship between elephants and woody vegetation dynamics at local and landscape scales. To represent uneven within‐reserve use, we further used movement data from 315 GPS‐collared elephants to model habitat selection and estimate spatially explicit local densities in 15 reserves. Across reserves, vegetation height generally decreased whereas woody cover generally increased. Both trends varied nonlinearly with reserve‐average elephant density: reserves with 1–2 elephants km −2 experienced the fastest declines in height and increases in cover, whereas increases in woody cover were weak or absent at the highest observed densities (approximately three elephants km −2 ), although uncertainty was substantial. At the local scale (1 km 2 ), vegetation dynamics were most strongly linked to fire frequency and changes in rainfall, yet higher estimated elephant density was associated with faster declines in vegetation height and progressively weaker gains in woody cover; the fitted woody‐cover trend became negative at the highest local densities (≥ 4 elephants km −2 ). These results indicate that elephants, at sufficient densities, can slow down increases in woody cover and promote shifts toward shorter vegetation locally, but have less pronounced effects at the reserve scale. The latter may reflect low population densities or a balance between positive (seed dispersal, resprouting) and negative (browsing, stem breakage) impacts on woody vegetation. Overall, our findings show that elephants can maintain open savanna structure where densities, or local concentrations of landscape use, are sufficiently high, emphasizing the importance of protecting and restoring viable populations.