New technologies help build harmony between human and elephants

August 12 is World Elephant Day. Established in 2012, World Elephant Day seeks to raise awareness about the critical threats faced by elephants and promote efforts to protect them.

The Asian elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Although more than 100,000 Asian elephants may have existed at the beginning of the 20th century, their numbers have declined by at least 50 percent over the past 100 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Among the numerous challenges elephants face, habitat loss and conflicts with human communities remain major threats.

With the expansion of the human population, elephant habitat continues to shrink and become more fragmented. People and elephants are increasingly coming into contact and conflict with each other.

In southwestern China's Yunnan Province, which has one of the world's richest biodiversity, humans are using technology to try to stay harmonious with the giant wildlife.

After decades of conservation efforts, the population of Asian elephants has steadily increased, and their habitat continues to expand.

According to Yunnan's forestry and grassland administration, the number of Asian elephants has grown from 150 in the 1980s to over 300 today. Most of them live in border regions, including the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Lincang City and Pu'er City in Yunnan.

Local administration said nine baby Asian elephants have been born in Pu'er since last year.

The rising Asian elephant population is a significant achievement, but it brings new problems for the locals.

As the animals' number grow, their habit expands. These elephants become less afraid of humans and frequently enter fields and villages to find food.

Dangerous conflicts are more likely to happen in this situation, which have always been a difficult problem in elephant conservation.

People generally try to limit the animals' movement, for example, by setting up fences or a deep ditch to isolate their moving area from the human community. However, these methods alone are not enough to prevent the conflicts.

The solution Yunnan's local administration found is building an intelligent system to monitor and give early warnings about the elephants' movement.

In the early days, this work was done manually. "We have over 100 staff for monitoring. Once they find any tracks of Asian elephants, they immediately send a warning to the villagers through radio broadcast, SMS or WeChat," said Yang Yong, a senior engineer from the forestry and grassland administration in Pu'er City, where around 180 Asian elephants are observed.

Yang Yong said it is difficult to monitor the elephants' movements because the forests are sometimes dark and foggy, and staff need to keep a distance from the animals for safety. Hence, the accuracy and speed of the warning transmission might be affected.

However, with the help of new technology, things have changed significantly.

"Now we use a drone with thermal imaging technology to monitor the elephants. It is more accurate and can make up for the shortage of manual monitoring," said Yang.

In 2018, a monitor and warning center was built under the Scientific Research Institute of Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna, another major habitat for the Asian elephants in China.

Many new technologies at the center, including fully automatic infrared camera surveillance, drones, a cloud service system and a smart broadcast system, are being used to enhance the ability to detect and send warnings.

Once an infrared camera in the wild captures an image of Asian elephants, it quickly sends pictures, geographic data and other information back to the center's cloud service. After cloud computation, a warning message is automatically generated to notify villagers to stay away from certain areas where elephants appear.

"It only takes about 12 seconds from detecting the elephant to sending out a warning," said Tan Xujie, director of the center.

"Not even one incident of human-elephant conflict has occurred in the areas covered by these systems," said Tan.

In addition to some 600 infrared cameras set up to monitor the elephants, 177 sets of loudspeakers with a smart broadcast system and a smartphone application help guarantee that villagers can receive notifications without delay.

The speakers are set up in over 12 townships and 38 villages in the region and broadcast loud warning messages. It is a simple but effective solution.

The center developed and launched a smartphone application in June 2020. Its employees can upload information once they detect Asian elephants and quickly release a warning.

The speaker system and the phone application are linked to the center's cloud service, enabling warnings to be automatically published once the system confirms the presence of Asian elephants via the collected images and other information sent from the infrared cameras.

The total number of warnings sent from the application since its launch has exceeded 100,000.

In June 2020, the monitor center implemented AI technology to identify Asian elephants in the images, reducing the workforce needed and cutting the time it takes to send a warning.

"As the AI processes more samples, it will continue to learn and upgrade itself. So far, it has achieved an accuracy of 96 percent in identifying Asian elephants," Tan said.

As the largest creatures on land, elephants have posed a significant challenge in terms of co-existence. However, the innovative elephant monitoring practices in Yunnan offer a glimmer of hope. They suggest that with the right blend of innovation and technology, we can pave the way for a harmonious co-existence with these magnificent animals.