It’s late evening in Ruam Thai village, just outside Kuiburi National Park in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, Thailand. On my laptop screen, camera trap videos flicker to life: an elephant (Elephas maximus) moving slowly across farmland, a farmer checking fields with a flashlight, the quiet tension of life lived at the forest’s edge.
Camera traps capture nighttime elephant movements through farmlands bordering Kuiburi National Park
This is what I have seen when assisting PhD researcher Sateesh Venkatesh to analyse camera trap footage from farms surrounding Ruam Thai. The village, established by the government, sits like an island, surrounded on three sides by national park. Families live clustered in the centre, while their fields spread outward, bordering the unfenced national park, it’s a layout that leaves farms vulnerable – and elephants know it.
The air is fresh, there is a light dew on the leaves, and the first shafts of the morning sun pierce the tree cover as our team heads out to the field. These calm mornings in the field typically start the same way, but they disguise the complexity and challenges faced at night by many of the farmers we are off to meet. Mornings for these farmers mean an interlude between nights spent defending their crops from elephants and days of hard work maximizing the production of the same crops.
Lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime, and chili – these ingredients of the Tom Yum soup, a classic Thai dish, don’t simply remain in the bowl. They also play a role in facilitating human-elephant co-existence. Our partner in Thailand, Bring The Elephant Home (BTEH), began the Tom Yum project in 2020 to help support the local community by designing and implementing experiments using alternative crops that are unpalatable to roaming elephants. In 2022, we also welcomed PhD researcher Tyler Nuckols of The University of Colorado, Boulder in Ruam Thai for a first 4-month pilot study on the potential of alternative cropping as a method to promote human-elephant coexistence, which will contribute to the completion of their PhD dissertation. Three years after its conception, this project has grown from helping farmers alleviate economic losses to a profitable and eco-friendly venture. What’s going on in Ruam Thai nowadays?
This slider shows areas containing habitat for elephants (yellow) in the year 1700 vs. 2000.
Where Did The Elephant Habitats Go?
The bulk of conservation efforts center around protected areas as the primary means of safeguarding wildlife and wild places. This is in response to recognizing that human activities are altering the face of the earth at an alarming pace, leading to the loss and fragmentation of habitat for numerous species. Often, our attention is on proximate threats and especially on particular biomes, such as forests. But over what sort of timescale and what sorts of ecosystems have these changes actually been taking place? In order to protect the biodiversity we have today, we have to really understand the processes that maintain them and how we got to where we are.
Asian elephants provide a good perspective on the problem. I’d heard some conservation organizations state that elephants had lost as much as 90% of their historic range, but I couldn’t find a single scientific reference that showed this. Was it true? When I first saw their distribution on a map, I got curious – though classified as a single species, Asian elephant populations occupy many different types of landscapes ranging from grasslands to rainforests that are now cut-off from another. At one time, these disparate populations must have been joined together and if we could reconstruct what happened to these habitats over time, we would have part of the answer. So, I enlisted a team of collaborators to find out exactly when and where elephant habitats started disappearing. In a way, you can think of elephants as being ambassadors for these ecosystems (a reason they’re referred to as “flagship” species). But we couldn’t know exactly where elephants or their habitats had been simply by looking at maps or records directly, so we needed a different trick.
UWERP’s field technician, Janaka, delivering a month’s supply of dry rations to a rural Sri Lankan family
The story so far…
Over the last few months, Sri Lanka’s economy crashed and the island nation is now facing its worst economic crisis in history. For Sri Lankans, the crisis has turned their daily lives into an endless cycle of waiting in lines for basic goods – many of which are being rationed. Why is this happening?
The main reasons are loss of foreign currency due to COVID’s impact on tourism, and mismanagement of the country’s predominantly agricultural economy. Foreign reserves have been reduced by roughly 85%, grinding daily life to a halt. There are huge lines for fuel (for transport) and gas (for cooking). The lack of fuel also affects the country’s power supply, with people facing up to 16 hrs of power cuts daily. The lack of fuel has created a shortage of vegetables in the market and thus the prices have shot up by 30-80%. Additionally, as the country cannot afford imports, products like butter and milk powder are now unavailable. The Sri Lankan Medical Association has also stated that medical supplies are running low and by the end of April, Sri Lanka ran out of key medicines and medical supplies.
As the world grows more crowded, spaces inhabited by wildlife and humans tend to overlap resulting in human-wildlife conflict (HWC). While peaceful coexistence is possible, negative encounters due to various factors continue to be a challenge in conservation. Human expansion into wildlife habitat is especially problematic for Asian elephants that need a large area for their ecological needs[1]. As a result, these animals break into human settlements and cause significant losses to the community.
Asian elephants are found to impose the highest damages with a probability of 35.1%.[4] Photo by Lokesh Kaushik on Unsplash
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals provide a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for people and the planet. In celebration of Earth Month, we broke down all 17 Global Goals to discover how each relates back to our mission to protect and conserve Asian elephants and their habitat.
Global Goal 1: No Poverty
In developing countries where elephants roam wild, like Sri Lanka, poverty and elephants can become intertwined. Small farmers can lose their entire livelihood overnight from an elephant raid, and an 8,000 pound animal walking through a farm can destroy everything in its path.
Finding ways for farmers to make a living alongside Asian elephants is key to the survival and success of both elephants and people. Our Coexistence Project studies both sides to develop innovative ways that farmers can maintain a steady income while living peacefully alongside wild Asian elephants.
A new study brings hope for reducing conflicts between elephants and farmers in Thailand
Guest post by Antoinette van de Water
Beehive fences in Thailand. Photo: BTEH
Kaeng Hang Maeo district in Eastern Thailand is in an area of high human-elephant conflict. A herd of about 70–80 elephants lives between the protected areas and agricultural land, causing damage to crops almost on a nightly basis. Over four years ago, Bring The Elephant Home (BTEH) and the Phuluang Wildlife Research Station started a joint project to evaluate the effectiveness of beehive fences in deterring Asian elephants, under supervision of Dr. Lucy King. We set up a pilot beehive fence around a subsistence farm surrounded by elephant habitat and installed camera-traps to record the elephants’ reactions to the bees, which belong the species Apis mellifera, or European honeybee.
These farmers in Sri Lanka are at the interface of forest and agriculture, where most incursions by elephants occur.
In Sherpur, rural Bangladesh, as the human population increases, so does the demand for the land and natural resources that the elephants need to survive. This is a story of human-animal conflict that is repeated around the globe with many species and rural communities as they struggle to find the balance for coexistence. Continue reading →
Pradeep’s father along with Pradeep’s wife and daughter, welcoming us to their farm.
Almost every other day we read about some “human-elephant” conflict in the local Sri Lankan newspapers. Some claimed that 2019 has seen the most deaths of elephants, due to human elephant conflicts. The government resorted to the dubious strategy of handing out guns to the Civil Defense Force and wildlife officers in order to control the problem. Through-out the passage of time, humanity has never been great at making moral judgements. Lack of government regulations, rightful laws, proper economical structure and even cultural knowledge, the humans and elephants become victims of this shortfall. Sadly, without proper regulations and monitoring, the human-elephant conflict will only increase in Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile conservationists are also busy finding ways to reduce the suffering from either of the two sides – the Elephants or the Humans. Continue reading →
