Super initiative! I hope you get a lot of entries to this coding challenge!

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:

Cheers,

Lars

Hi,

This is rakesh kalva from India. I have been working on human-elephant conflict in the state of Andhra Pradesh for the past 5 years. This is a cool idea. I have used camera traps to identify movement and individual elephants for demographic data. 

Some field based observations of using camera traps for elephants:

1. I usually place the camera traps on forest paths and many of the images we captured wernt of the complete elephant. Its just the legs and trunk. Wont that effect the detection by the software as to wether its an elephant or not?

2. In case of flash cameras , quite a lot of our cameras got damaged by elephants. So we were going for IR cameras. WIll it work for IR cameras as well?

3. Another issue is with the cameras being stolen by locals or poachers.

4. So we gave up all this and are using a simple trip technology with a switch attached to a door bell attached to a rope placed at a height of 7-8 feet. In this landscape no other animal is at this heigh so when the alarm is triggered we know its an elephant.

5. Elephants operate in a large territor, so will it be feasable to use this technology? 

But there are some interesting research questions that can be answered with this technology you are developing. Kindly let me know if i can be of any help on field.

Regards,

Rakesh Kalva

Wildlife Biologist

Hi Neil,

I am a project manager for Zoological Society of London's Thailand Programme. We work in the southern Western Forest Complex of Thailand, which is a large landscape of relatively contiguous forest surrounded by development and agriculture and thus rife with human-elephant conflict. We are currently looking to co-develop or pilot low-cost cameras or acoustic sensors for real-time detection of elephants at HEC hotspots within the landscape. Current issues we've been facing are high rates of non-target stimuli triggers which clog up the cloud (so the automated classification of elephants would be useful to limit notifications) and the high cost of conventional cellular camera systems. I am curious to know the current status of your Elephant AI system. The most recent update I've found on your hackaday is of the combination with a deterrence system, which is very promising. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or reply to this message.

Cheers,

Juliana

Hello Carlos and Chavoux, 

Interesting exchange, thank you! Working on HWC, boh locally on Human-Jaguar coexistence in French Guyana and globally through the ENCOSH platform, it would great to learn more from your initiatives and  experiences!

An opportunity to do so is to join us and contribute to the ENCOSH platform: https://encosh.org/en/

It is a recent international collaborative platform to promote the exchange of knowledge, experiences and ideas among all stakeholders worldwide to better tackling Human-Wildlife coexistence issues. A forum will be very soon included also. 

Your contribution would be meaningful by submitting some of your initiatives to this community. Besides, you could find and make comments on a list of almost 100 extant initiatives used to enhance Human-Wildlife interactions worldwide. 

I remain available if you need further information or guidance. 

All the best 
Tommy Gaillard

This is an awesome thread and very enlightening. Thank you! I started reading this as Oregon recently had an entire pack of wolves poisoned, and I wanted to understand the viewpoints that go into these conversations. Thank you!