GPS Collars Are Helping Save Sumatra’s Last Wild Elephants
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- Author: Aisyah Llewellyn
- Full Title: GPS Collars Are Helping Save Sumatra’s Last Wild Elephants
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #geospatial #planet
- URL: https://restofworld.org/2023/surveillance-tech-saving-wild-elephants/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
Highlights
- RSF is part of a movement. In animal-human conflicts in recent years, some NGOs have turned to monitoring technology — not to spy on either wild animals or humans, but to broker peace. Various companies now do a brisk trade in elephant GPS collars, and a Nepali software engineer has designed an app-based alert system to de-escalate encounters between elephants and people. One method even imitates the sound of buzzing bees, playing on the elephants’ threat perception to drive them away. (View Highlight)
- Fitting the collars isn’t an easy task. Tracking a wild elephant, finding it, and then getting close enough to shoot a sedative dart into its ears — some of the thinnest skin on an elephant’s body — can take up to a week.
Once the elephant is knocked out, the collar is hauled onto its back and fixed around its neck using a metal buckle. A pouch, fitted with a GPS tracker, hangs on the collar. The tracker connects to a satellite, which sends the RSF team GPS coordinates of the elephant’s location. (View Highlight)
- From the township of Duri, 22 RSF employees track the elephants using their mobile phones, punching the coordinates into Google Maps. If they see an animal’s coordinates coming close to a village, they call the village chief to intervene. Two RSF staff monitor the GPS trackers at all times, working in shifts.
Syukri said that RSF intervenes almost every day, sending messages and warnings to village chiefs in the area through a WhatsApp group called “Early Warning.” (View Highlight)
- The system is not foolproof, and if the elephants enter a particularly dense area of jungle with a thick canopy, the signal can be lost. But, since 2022, no elephants have yet managed to enter a village, as the GPS collars always transmit a signal in those areas. (View Highlight)