ELEPHANTS MAY NOT DANCE-BUT THEY SPEAK, IF SOMEONE CAN LISTEN

Let’s meet some Elephant Whisperers and Listeners who are keeping their eyes and ears peeled for all the secrets that elephants share in a deep forest

- Pratima H

DANIELA HEDWIG
Team lead, Elephant Listening Project

From the AI-led anti-poaching tools and virtual fences at Zambia’s Kafue National Park to recording sounds of Humpback whales and using Machine Learning in NOAA Pacific islands, to using heat signatures for conservation wof Koalas in Australia – technology is rising as a trumpet in many forests and islands cross the globe. Today, more than ever, technology is helping in creating better conservation strategies, strengthening anti-poaching squads to catch hunters, and understanding forest elephants better.

Like in Cornell university’s Elephant Listening Project, that is using acoustics monitoring to conserve the tropical forests of Africa with a focus on forest elephants. It is a project that began in 2007 for gathering new data from the forests of Central Africa, to achieve conservation goals, and build capacity in Central Africa to ensure sustainable conservation into the future. The project has collected sounds from the forest at 32 different locations, many monitored continuously for years. It boasts of the world's largest archive of sounds from Central Africa-almost one million hours. But more than that it has to its credit-the impact of underlining the effects of oil exploration on elephant behavior, work on seasonal use at a multitude of forest clearings, successful alerts on illegal hunting and probes on the nocturnal behavior of forest elephants.