Forest Department moots profiling of wild elephants across Tamil Nadu

Efforts to expand wild elephant profiling in Tamil Nadu for mitigating human-elephant conflicts through scientific data collection and analysis.

The Forest Department has launched efforts to expand profiling of wild elephants to all forest divisions with elephant presence, data of which will be used for mitigating negative interactions between humans and elephants in future. Profiling efforts had been done earlier in Gudalur and in Coimbatore Forest Division.

Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Conservation and Greening Project for Climate Change Response (TBGPCCR) on Thursday organised a training on elephant profiling for Department staff of the ranks between Watcher and Forest Range Officer from different divisions at the Tamil Nadu Forest Academy in association with Osai, an environmental organisation.

Chief Project Director of TBGPCCR I. Anwardeen said the Department has already started uploading information on sightings of elephants on the website tnfdyaanai.com under Project Thadagam. Based on these data, an algorithm can predict possible locations of elephant movement.

V. Thirunavukkarasu, Principal, Central Academy for State Forest Service, Coimbatore, observed that the human-elephant conflict situation intensified in the past 20 years. More scientific approach was needed to address the present situation.

D. Venkatesh, Chief Conservator of Forests and Field Director of Anamalai Tiger Reserve, said that scientific profiling of elephants will help in ending the practice of giving random names to elephants.