Vietnam's wild elephants get unique 'ID cards' in novel conservation plan
Technology
They are using visual data from camera traps to create individual ‘ID cards’ for elusive elephants
DONG NAI PROVINCE (Web Desk) - Dinh Quan knows just the right spot to hang out on a warm day.
A pool of clean water with fresh grass and some bamboo shoots nearby, preferably with vines hanging within easy reach and showing no signs of being poisonous.
The two tusk buddies are wild Asian elephants living in the Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve, a conservation area in Vietnam which includes the Cat Tien National Park, and where an innovative project using “camera traps” is under way to create a unique catalogue of “elephant ID cards” for the area’s much-diminished population of pachyderms.
Pruthu Fernando, chairman of the Sri Lanka-based Centre for Conservation and Research, told Al Jazeera that unlike human society where age and experience confer a degree of respect, among elephants it is size and body mass that decides their social hierarchy.
Fernando, who is an adviser to the United States-based Humane Society International (HSI), said that when elephants reach puberty, at approximately 10 years of age, they drift from the near-constant care of their mothers to join other male elephants in social groups.
That is why Bien Dong and Dinh Quan had buddied up and how a photo of the two trundling towards a waterhole was caught by motion sensor cameras in April. The cameras are part of an elephant conservation project spearheaded by HSI’s Vietnam chapter and local authorities in southern Dong Nai province.
“No one else has done this,” Mai said of the 60 “camera traps” operating in the Dong Nai conservation area, which is located approximately two hours’ drive from Vietnam’s business capital Ho Chi Minh City.
The cameras, inconspicuously attached to the trunks of trees along tracks that animals use to traverse the forest, have sensors that activate when large mammals, like Bien Dong and Dinh Quan, pass by.
The HSI data compiled to create the unique “elephant ID cards” consists of more than 16,000 images collected during approximately 400 days of camera monitoring from June 2022 onwards.
Analysis of the photographic data appears to show that there are at least 27 elephants in the conservation area, a significant increase from the previous estimate of 14 pachyderms that were thought to form the total population.
The data also indicates that the herd of 27 is in good condition with an average health index score higher than elephants found in Sri Lanka, a country with a significantly larger elephant population and where they inhabit 60 percent of the country’s total land area.
