A crowd-sourced approach for monitoring Asian elephants outside protected areas

Although nature conservation has traditionally relied on the creation of vast human free areas, the focus is now widening to also include `buffer' and `corridor' areas that also include human dominated landscapes. This is especially true for a country like India, with a high population density of over 400 people per sq km, while also being home to two thirds of the world's Asian elephants. Human-Wildlife Conflict is now one of the biggest challenges, as a few hundred people are killed every year in India by elephants alone, almost all in accidental encounters. Given that most of these forest areas are now covered by mobile phone networks and that many local people as well as forest guards have mobile phones, it is feasible to conceive of a mobile phone-based system to alert people of approaching elephants. The crowd-sourced elephant tracking system proposed here automatically consolidates information received from multiple contributors through mobile phones into a single geo-referenced grid which can be used by human experts to predict elephant movements and alert villages in their projected path, thus avoiding deaths and injury while also providing valuable previously undocumented information on how elephants use human dominated landscapes.