Trap-camera alerts on elephants save lives (Calcutta)
Trap-camera alerts on elephants save lives (Calcutta)
Debraj Mitra Calcutta, Telegraph India
July 18, 2024
See link
https://www.telegraphindia.com/west-bengal/kolkata/trap-camera-alerts-on-elephants-save-lives/cid/2034416for
photo.
Trap cameras installed in a pocket of Jhargram have not only captured
images of elephants headed to human habitations but shared real-time alerts
that helped the forest department save lives.
Thirty AI-powered cameras were placed in four forest ranges — Jhargram,
Lodhashuli, Gidhni and Manikpara — between October 2023 and April 2024 as a
pilot project.
Together, these places had reported at least four human deaths and several
injuries caused by elephants in the same period in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023,
said forest officials. But between October 2023 and April 2024, no death or
injury was reported, they said.
The cameras detected elephants leaving forests to move along roads, trails
and routes bordering human settlements. The main objective of the
technology, called TrailGuard AI Camera alert system, was to send alerts in
real time to the local forest field staff to improve the response time to a
conflict situation, and simultaneously mobilise rapid response teams to
prevent fatalities and injuries.
Cameras are usually used in population estimation exercises and to study
the habitat distribution of a particular species. But using cameras to
detect elephants and share real-time alerts is new in south Bengal,
foresters said.
A top forest official of the state said the new technology has proven to be
“very useful”. But the cost has to be brought down to enable its
implementation on a wider scale, he
said.
RESOLVE, a US-based NGO that provides tech solutions to biodiversity and
conservation issues, partnered with the state forest department for the
pilot project, which was funded by the Japan International Cooperation
Agency (Jica).
The same camera alert technology was earlier used in human-tiger conflict
mitigation in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
In Jhargram, the cameras were placed on the edge of the forests, the
boundaries that elephants cross while moving towards villages.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the 30 cameras together shared 266
real-time alerts on elephant movement.
“The forest department had clear guidelines. One of which was to reduce the
chances of elephants going undetected when heading towards villages.
Second, given the likelihood of detections of humans along the same routes
in this multi-use landscape, they required the AI system to filter out
human detections. Third, they also wanted the system to filter out smaller
animals like wild boars and wolves,” said Sankarshan Rastogi of RESOLVE,
the project manager.
“In the same period, there were over 33,000 human detections. Domestic
water buffaloes, cattle, boar, village dogs, wolves, when combined,
accounted for only 27 detections. But only elephant alerts were sent,” said
Rastogi.
Interventions by rapid response teams were needed after 40 per cent of the
alerts, said a forest official. In the remaining 60 per cent cases, the
location and direction of the elephant/s suggested that the individual or
herd was moving from one forest patch to another.
Some of the points mentioned in the project report submitted to the forest
department:
More than 70 per cent of the detections occurred at only six sites at the
forest-village interface across the entire the Gidhni and
Jhargram-Lodhasuli forest ranges
Around 28 per cent of the elephant detections were during the day time and
nearly 72 per cent at night
Most detections were of lone bulls (114), followed by nearly equal numbers
of small groups (87) and large herds (65).
Debal Ray, the chief wildlife warden of Bengal, said the AI-powered cameras
had “proven to be very efficient and useful”, but gave a rider.
“The cameras are very costly. Unless the cost comes down, wide-scale
implementation will be difficult, even if we consider just south Bengal,”
Ray told this newspaper.
The report says the cost of deploying 100 such cameras will be roughly the
same as that of capturing and radio-collaring two conflict-prone lone bulls.
“We are constantly working on lowering the cost. As production goes up, the
cost will come down. We are discussing that with the forest department,”
Rastogi said.
Pankaj Suryawanshi, the divisional forest officer of Jhargram, described
the pilot project as a “great learning experience”.
But the requirement was on a much larger scale, he said. “The cameras, if
mounted on drones, can be of greater use. They are not static then. But all
these are still in the planning stage,” he said.
Aritra Kshettry, national lead for elephant conservation, WWF-India, said
Trailguard AI or similar products “with a short detection range (about 30m)
but accurate image identification can be useful near or around human
settlements to warn people of the presence of elephants”.
“But affordability and ease of operation also needs to be considered to
ensure seamless adoption by the local communities and forest departments,”
said Kshettry, who was not associated with this project.