Monitoring Elephant Habitats to Understand and Reduce Human-Elephant Conflict

The wild elephant is a long-ranging, long-lived, and the largest mammal on land. Elephants need vast spaces and abundant resources such as browse, grass, and water. Elephant habitats are being lost to human developmental activities — and it is not just the vast hectares of loss that matter, but also the manner in which they are lost. A habitat lost in fragments is far more detrimental to elephant conservation than mere loss of the same size, because sharing a landscape with humans invariably leads to conflict over common resources.

Understanding the dynamics of human-elephant conflict that often results in human and elephant deaths, requires monitoring habitats over a large spatial scale and over long time periods, almost continuously — something that is not possible with ground surveys alone. Remote-sensed data from satellites, in conjunction with ground surveys, make it possible to monitor elephant habitats at the scale this problem demands.