Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Elephant movement mapping in Hosur forest border areas to detect the elephant intrusion pattern and mitigation measures to resolve human–elephant conflict

  • Published:
GeoJournal Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

During a 3 year examination of object movement tracking in Hosur forest border areas found, different elephant detection methods were used to track the movement. In this paper, problems such as Human–Elephant Conflicts (HEC), poaching and crop raiding were evaluated due to elephant movement. By mapping the elephant movement, it is found that elephant movements were seasonal and used similar paths for movements. In the proposed approach, elephant movement from the forest areas to the nearby villages was mapped and possible mitigation measures to overcome the human elephant conflicts were discussed. A survey observation work is made in Hosur forest areas during 1st April 2020 to 30th June 2020 to understand the elephant movement and spatial distribution. Real time data collection made from the villages around the forest areas, by making field visits. Spatial autocorrelation techniques are used in analyzing the spatial distribution and movement pattern of elephants. ArcGIS software and Getis-Ord Gi* were used to determine the spatial distribution of elephant movement. As a result, it is found that elephant movements were seasonal based such as rainfall decline in other part of forest areas and elephants tends to migrate occasionally. In order to overcome the problems of elephant movement into the human living areas, mitigation measures described has to be implemented.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Avinash, K., Phalke, S., & Sulaiman, A. (2015). A rapid-survey report on the Status of Human-Elephant Conflict at a Private Farmland at Gonmaknahalli Village abutting Anchetty Range (Hosur Forest Division – Tamilnadu). A Rocha India: Bangalore.

  • Balasubramaniam, M., Baskaran, N., Swaminathan, S., & Desai, A.A. (1993). Home range of elephants in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, South India. In: week with elephants. Proceedings of the International Seminar on the Conservation of Asian Elephant, (pp. 296–313).

  • Baskaran, N. (1995). Crop raiding by Asian elephant in Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, South India. In: Conference, international seminar on the conservation of Asian elephant (pp. 350–367).

  • Baskaran, N. (2013). An overview of Asian Elephants in the Western Ghats, southern India: Implications for the conservation of Western Ghats ecology. Journal of Threatened Taxa, 5(14), 4854–4870.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baskaran, N., & Boominathan, D. (2010). Road kill of animals by highway traffic in the tropical forests of Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, southern India. Journal of Threatened Taxa, 2(3), 753–759.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baskaran, N., Surendra, V., Sar, C. K., & Sukumar, R. (2011). Current status of Asian elephants in India. Journal of Gajah, 35, 47–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baskaran, N., & Venkatesh, P. (2009). Human elephant conflict in Hosur forest division, Tamilnadu, India. Asian Nature Conservation Foundation, pp 1–33.

  • Calabrese, A., Calabrese, J. M., Songer, M., et al. (2017). Conservation status of Asian elephants: The influence of habitat and governance. Biodiversity and Conservation., 26, 2067–2081. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1345-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Debasis, J. (2020). Anti-poaching watchers, guards are not machines. https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil-nadu/2020/jul/08/anti-poaching-watchers-guards-are-not-machines-2166998.html.

  • Desai, A. A., & Baskaran, N. (1996). Impact of human activities on the ranging behaviour of elephants in the Nilgiri biosphere Reserve, South India. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 93(3), 559–569.

    Google Scholar 

  • Forozan, G., Elmi, M. R., Talebi, A., Mokhtari, M. H., & Shojaei, S. (2020). Temporal-spatial simulation of landscape variations using combined model of markov chain and automated cell. KN-Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information, 70(2), 45–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hamidy, N., Alipur, H., Nasab, S. N. H., Yazdani, A., & Shojaei, S. (2016). Spatial evaluation of appropriate areas to collect runoff using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographical Information System (GIS)(case study: The catchment “Kasef” in Bardaskan. Modeling Earth Systems and Environment, 2(4), 1–11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • IUCN. (2017). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. www.iucnredlist.org.

  • Jacob, K., Eyuel, A., Nirvana, M., & Paul, H. (2018). Poaching detection technologies: A survey. Sensors, 18(1474), 1–27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jen Shaffer, L., Khadka, K. K., Hoek, J. V. D., & Naithani, K. J. (2019). Human-elephant conflict: A review of current management strategies and future directions. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 6(235), 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Y., Kang, J., Kim, D., et al. (2008). Design of a fence surveillance system based on wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communication Systems, Turin, Italy, 23–25 September, (pp.1–7).

  • Langbauer, W. R., Payne, K. B., Charif, R. A., Rapaport, L., & Osborn, F. (1991). African elephants respond to distant playbacks of low-frequency conspecific calls. Journal of Experimental Biology, 157, 35–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maheswari, J. M. (2013). A study on human –wildlife conflict in Coimbatore district with reference to elephants (Elephas Maximus). Indian Journal of Applied Research, 3(7), 181–182.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matawa, F., Murwira, A., & Schmidt, K. S. (2012). Explaining elephant (Loxodonta africana) and buffalo (Syncerus caffer) spatial distribution in the Zambezi Valley using maximum entropy modelling. Ecological Modelling, 242, 189–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michael, F. (2015). Integrating human elephant coexistence in Hosur Forest division of Tamil Nadu, India. International Elephant Organisation. https://elephantconservation.org/portfolio-items/integrating-human-elephant-coexistence-in-hosur-forest-division-of-tamil-nadu-india/.

  • Milda, D., Ramesh, T., Kalle, R., Gayathri, V., & Thanikodi, M. (2020). Ranger survey reveals conservation issues across Protected and outside Protected Areas in southern India. Global Ecology and Conservation, 24, e01256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2020

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MOEF. (2010). Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India. Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF), Government of India.

  • Oswin Perera, B. M. A. (2009). The human-elephant conflict: A review of current status and mitigation methods. Gaja, 30, 41–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piri, I., Moosavi, M., Taheri, A. Z., et al. (2019). The spatial assessment of suitable areas for medicinal species of Astragalus (Astragalus hypsogeton Bunge) using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS). The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science, 22(2), 193–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Preetam, S., Subhdeep, K., Vrijendra, S., & Maringanti, R. (2014). Algorithm for gunshot detection using mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC). In Proceedings of Ninth International Conference on Wireless Communication and Sensor Networks, Springer, New Delhi, India, (pp.155–166).

  • Ramesh Babu, M., Balasubramanian, G., Swaminathan, S., & Ranjit, M. (2012). The ‘State of Affairs’ of the Asian elephant elephas maximus in the Hosur and Dharmapuri forest divisions of Tamil Nadu, India. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 109(3), 182–191.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sibanda, M., Dube, T., Bangamwabo, V.M., et al. (2015). Understanding the spatial distribution of elephant (Loxodonta africana) poaching incidences in the mid-Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe using Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing. Geocarto International, 1–23.

  • Sridivya, P.V. (2015). https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/elephant-attack-hosur-struggles-to-mitigate-mananimal-conflict/article7462600.ece.

  • Sugumar, S. J., & Jayaparvathy, R. (2014). An improved real time image detection system for elephant intrusion along the forest border areas. The Scientific World Journal, 2014, 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sukumar, R. (2006). A brief review of the status, distribution and biology of wild Asian elephants. International Zoo Year Book, 40(1), 1–8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vanitha, V., Thiyagesan, K., & Baskaran, N. (2011). Social life of captive Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) in Southern India: Implications for elephant welfare. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 14, 42–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeppelzauer, M. (2015). Automated detection of elephants in wildlife video. EURASIP Journal of Image Video Process, 46, 1–48.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zeppelzauer, M., Hensman, S., & Stoeger, A. (2015). Towards an automated acoustic detection system for free ranging elephants. Bioacoustics, 24, 13–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeppelzauer, M., & Stoeger, A. S. (2015). Establishing the fundamentals for an elephant early warning and monitoring system. BMC Research Notes, 8(409), 1–15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zeppelzauer, M., Stoeger, A.S., & Brieteneder, C. (2013). Acoustic Detection of Elephant Presence in Noisy Environment. Proceedings of the 2nd International workshop on multimedia analysis for ecological data, Newyork, (pp.3–8).

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported and sponsored by Department of Science and Technology, Science Engineering and Research Board (DST-SERB). Authors would like to express their gratitude to the forest officials, officials from Theppakadu elephant camp and the villagers from Hosur forest area for their support during the data collection procedure.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, Kerala, 673601, India

    Prabu Mohandas

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MEA Engineering College, Vengoor, Kerala, India

    Jerline Sheebha Anni

  3. School of Computer Science, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India

    Tanupriya Choudhury

  4. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, 673601, Kerala, India

    Rajkumar Thanasekaran

Authors
  1. Prabu Mohandas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jerline Sheebha Anni
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Tanupriya Choudhury
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Rajkumar Thanasekaran
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Prabu Mohandas.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

The authors have no conflict of interests.

Human participants and/or animals

This research work had been made for analysing the pattern of elephant movement. Research work involves the study of elephant movement in the forest border areas. This research work does not involve human and elephant/or animal as participant.

Informed consent

We had acquired permission from the Tamil Nadu forest department for data collection and analysis procedures in Hosur forest area and Theppakadu elephant camp.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mohandas, P., Anni, J.S., Choudhury, T. et al. Elephant movement mapping in Hosur forest border areas to detect the elephant intrusion pattern and mitigation measures to resolve human–elephant conflict. GeoJournal 88 (Suppl 1), 3–14 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10481-8

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10481-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation