yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Text Messaging Helps Elephants and People Coexist | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

You know India has the highest number of Asian elephants, and there are millions of people living very close to or within the elephant landscapes. Between 1994 and 2015, 41 people lost their lives in direct encounters with elephants because people didn't know that there were elephants, so they were unaware of elephant presence. The Wai landscape is primarily a tea and coffee dominated landscape, but it is surrounded by large batches of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and tiger reserves.

We have about 70,000 people residing in the Valpar region, about 220 square kilometers, and they're all scattered. They're not living together in small clusters. There, you'll see a group of six families living in one place; a kilometer away, you'll see another group of six families. In between that, they have left certain forest patches, you know, without converting them into tea. They provide food sources for elephants, and they serve as halting stations for elephants when they are actually moving through these open areas of tea.

Historically, the plateau has been used by elephants to move across these plantations to go into surrounding protected areas. So, when they are actually moving through these tea plantation areas, that's where they come into contact with people. That's where an early warning could really help people to avoid these surprise encounters.

So, what we notice is that if we can develop an elephant information network here, we can have a better way of safeguarding people's lives. Most of the people who work in the estates have mobile phones these days. We update people about elephant presence through bulk messages, sending out text messages telling them where elephants are.

We have a team of four people; they track elephants every day. The moment we have information about where all the elephants are in the landscape, we send out messages. This has actually developed a kind of network system. Think of it this way: there are 70,000 people, which means that 140,000 eyes, so elephants can't escape these eyes.

We also keep basically up to date with which herds are moving about, but we also look at communicating this information to the people. It could be people who are working in the estates, the management, or the forest department—just to keep everybody updated about where the elephants are in their regions, so they don't accidentally encounter these elephants.

So that bush area, you know, before we started, an average of three people used to die per year. Now, it has come down to one. If the same average had continued, there would have been 19 more people who lost their lives in this landscape. Addressing the safety of people is a primary issue. We definitely need to look at the avenues that can actually facilitate coexistence between people and elephants.

More Articles

View All
How Startup Fundraising Works | Startup School
Foreign [Music] I’m Brad Flora. I’m a group partner here at YC, and I’m going to be talking about how startup fundraising works today. Like I said, I’m a group partner at YC, and what that means is that I read applications, I interview the startups that …
"Why I Started MINING My Own BITCOIN!" (Millionaire Bitcoin Advice) | Kevin O'Leary
We don’t think you should own coin made in China. I said the only way I can possibly not own kind of China coin is to make it myself. So, new game plan: every coin I’m going to own, I’m going to know where it came from, when it was created, and it’s goin…
How to GET RICH with ChatGPT
What’s up, guys! It’s Grammy here. So, in the middle of a recession, one industry seems to be absolutely booming, with the promise of making a lot of people really rich—and that would be artificial intelligence. For example, I told OpenAI’s ChatGPT to wr…
Warren Buffett: How to Turn $10,000 Into $51 Million
We have operated in this country with the greatest tailwind at our back that you can imagine. It’s an investor’s—it means you can’t really fail at it unless you buy the wrong stock or just get excited at the wrong time. But if you owned a cross-section of…
Analyzing functions for discontinuities (discontinuity example) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So we’ve got this function ( f(x) ) that is piecewise continuous. It’s defined over several intervals. Here for ( 0 < x \leq 2 ), ( f(x) ) is ( \ln(x) ). For any ( x > 2 ), well then ( f(x) ) is going to be ( x^2 \cdot \ln(x) ). What we want to do …
Understanding and building phylogenetic trees | High school biology | Khan Academy
When we look at all of the living diversity around us, the natural question is, “Well, how related are the different species to each other?” If you put that into an evolutionary context, relatedness should be tied to how recently two species shared a comm…