The critically endangered sumatran elephant continues to face pressure from habitat destruction, the resulting frequently escalating human-elephant conflict (HEC), and poaching

This Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service under the Asian Elephant Conservation Fund (CFDA 15.621) provides $519,324.67 to Wildlife Conservation International LIMITED, a foreign non-profit organization, to protect Sumatran elephants and their habitat in the Leuser Ecosystem of Indonesia. The project aims to implement regular elephant protection patrols, develop a bioacoustic early-warning monitoring system to detect elephant presence, and work with local farming communities to mitigate human-elephant conflict. The awarded funding will support three elephant protection teams to monitor and prevent poaching, as well as further develop and evaluate the new bioacoustic ELOC system against existing technologies like GPS collars. By stabilizing human-elephant interactions and promoting non-invasive monitoring, the project intends to decrease the risk of severe human-elephant conflict and support the conservation of the critically endangered Sumatran elephant population.

There are most likely fewer than 1,500 sumatran elephants left in the wild, scattered across the island in small and isolated subpopulations. Many of these surviving subpopulations are too small to be genetically viable and the unavailability of additional suitable habitat and severe HEC reduces the chances of increasing or even maintaining their numbers in most areas. This project aims at protecting sumatran elephants and their habitat in the leuser ecosystem, the only place on earth where elephants, tigers, orangutans and rhinos are found in the same landscape. Home to one of the largest elephant subpopulations - and with about 2.6 million hectares among the largest remaining rainforests in sumatra - the leuser ecosystem is a key area for elephant survival in indonesia. Three elephant protection teams (epts) will implement regular patrols to monitor and prevent poaching and encroachment in the project area, and work closely with local farming communities to mitigate HEC. The work of the epts will be supported by a new bioacoustic elephant monitoring system, the eloc, that we plan to further develop and evaluate against established monitoring tools (foremost GPS collars). The idea of the eloc is to make use of elephant vocalisations, including low frequency rumbles, in order to automatically detect and locate elephants from a distance. The information is then FED into a real-time early-warning system that alerts HEC mitigation teams and collaborating farmers if elephants are moving towards fields and villages, and also helps to increase the efficiency of anti-poaching patrols. As a result of this project, we expect a substantial decrease in the risk of severe HEC (human and elephant deaths and injuries) to occur, and a general stabilisation of the lives and economy of the rural farming communities that have to coexist with elephants in the project area. The thorough test and ongoing development of the new eloc system in the framework of this project will also allow US to further explore the potential of this still very new approach, and upon successful implementation, to promote this non-invasive elephant monitoring alternative in other elephant areas in the region.