Why would you want to avoid alerting the rangers ?

You don't need high tech for this; elephants leave very obvious tracks and sign. 

Hi Tyler,

Would like to introduce you to Ceres Tags products

• Ceres Tags products come in boxes of 5, 10 and 24. 
• There are some software partners such as Earthranger, Mapipedia and possibly CiboLabs that would be able to assist you with your mapping vegetation requirements
• Ceres Tag does not require any towers, base stations and infrastructure. This allows you to see any movements from the heard outside of their normal herd (boundary alerts), and you will not be disturbing any of the flora and fauna with infrastructure set up. 
• For the timing you are looking at, Ceres Wild pings directly to satellite 24 times a day. For Ceres Trace and Ceres Ranch there are 4 within 24 hours. Taking into consideration, when you set up alert areas, you will get them directly to your phone/laptop via your software of choice
• Ceres Ranch is a reusable tag that has just been launched. Use it on this project, remove the tag and then use the tag on your next project
• The software you choose will assist with the history of your animal movements. Ceres Tag is integrated with 11 software partners and in-development with 18 software partners https://cerestag.com/pages/software-partners
• Understanding it is a short-term project, you would be able to use Ceres Tags products without the additional expense of setting up and removing infrastructure- towers, gateways
• With Ceres Tag, you are purchasing the box of tags and picking a suitable software to deliver the information you require. On average, a box of 10 Ceres Trace Tags, is the same as 1 LoRaWAN tower. 

I just came across this interesting paper in which seismic monotoring of animals like elephants was mentioned. 

This is the study refered to:

Seismic savanna: machine learning for classifying wildlife and behaviours using ground‐based vibration field recordings

Our planet is facing its sixth mass extinction, with hundreds of species disappearing largely because of human activity. To mitigate this existential threat of biodiversity loss, we must monitor and ...

ZSL Publications

Cheers,

Lars

If you haven't read them, these 2 papers offer propose decision-making frameworks for sensitive animal occurrence data:

Tulloch AIT, Auerbach N, Avery-Gomm S, Bayraktarov E, Butt N, Dickman CR, Ehmke G, Fisher DO, Grantham H, Holden MH, et al. 2018. A decision tree for assessing the risks and benefits of publishing biodiversity data. Nature Ecol. Evol. 2: 1209-1217. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0608-1

Lennox RJ, Harcourt R, Bennett JR, Davies A, Ford AT, Frey RM, Hayward MW, Hussey NE, Iverson SJ, Kays R. 2020. A novel framework to protect animal data in a world of ecosurveillance. BioScience 70(6): 468–476. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa035

The Research Data Alliance has 2 relevant interest groups:

Sensitive Data IG: This is just getting started.

Data Policy Standardization and Implementation IG: For those publishing results, this group is working on advising more consistent data-access policies. In the paper below resulting from this group's work, they give some general suggestions for defining exceptions to open data policies that include sensitive species data:

Hrynaszkiewicz I, Simons N, Hussain A, Grant R, Goudie S. 2020. Developing a research data policy framework for all journals and publishers. Data Science Journal 19(1): 5. http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-005

If others know of relevant resources please share!

Our team was just talking about this as well.  We work in bioacoustics, so not as complex as the camera trap strategies described in the publication. 

Strategy we landed on was to automatically round geo coordinates to map an approx location for species presence. 

We welcome thoughts/opinions/ideas on this important topic for our sensitive species in Nepal, Bolivia, and US!

Fwiw, GBIF published guidance on this topic late last year:

Chapman AD (2020) Current Best Practices for Generalizing Sensitive Species Occurrence Data. Copenhagen: GBIF Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.15468/doc-5jp4-5g10.