Manula sheds light on monitoring elephant population

BANGALORE: Elephants are social, group-living mammals revered by people across diverse cultures in the world. Once widely distributed across a range of ecological conditions, currently distribution and abundance of elephants have both dwindled drastically throughout its range due to habitat loss, fragmentation and poaching. India holds the largest population of Asian elephants surviving today.

In spite of its conservation significance, elephant populations across many sites/countries continue to be monitored using methods and techniques that are not rooted strongly in the principles of modern wildlife science. Lack of rigorous data and reliable inputs on the population status of elephants have hampered their management across range countries.

In the manual titled 'Monitoring elephant populations and assessing threats', four scientists from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS-India) - Ullas Karanth, Samba Kumar, Varun Goswamy and Nishant Srinivasaiah, have contributed to six chapters (out of 13) in the manual.

The chapter titled 'Wildlife population monitoring: A Conceptual Framework' (authors James Nichols and Ullas Karanth) provides the underlying statistical framework which is essential for considering and developing methods for assessing elephant populations. It succinctly brings to fore the relationship among the different methods and provides a reference basis to generate new methods that can specifically cater to needs of monitoring low-density elephant populations across large areas of inaccessible terrain.

In the Chapter titled Estimating abundance and other demographic parameters in elephant populations using Capture-Recapture sampling: Statistical Concepts', authors Ullas Karanth, James Nichols and Simon Hedges provide detailed methodological aspects of Capture-Recapture theory, which is now widely used for monitoring tiger populations. This technique has immense potential for monitoring elephants, especially individuals that are primarily targeted for ivory.

This method besides enabling reliable estimation of elephant population size, can be effectively applied for monitoring population trends over time and for understanding many difficult-to- study aspects related to elephant biology such as dispersal, mortality, and movement rates within populations.