Hi-tech monitoring of the movement of Elephants in Chhattisgarh

• 09 Jun 2023

Why in News?

According to the information given by the Chhattisgarh Public Relations Department on 7 June 2023, Hi-tech monitoring of the movement of elephants in the forests of Chhattisgarh has been started. To ensure this, the AI-based 'Chhattisgarh Elephant Tracking and Alert App' has been developed.

Key Points:

• The app has been jointly developed by the Forest Management Information System (FMIS) and the Wildlife Wing to alert villagers in elephant-affected areas of Chhattisgarh.
• This app works on Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on inputs received from the Elephant Trackers (Hathi Mitra Dal). The purpose of this app is to send information about the presence of elephants by sending mobile calls, SMS, and WhatsApp alerts to every person in the affected village in addition to the 'Munaadi' announced by the elephant trackers.
• It is known that this app is being used in Udanti Sitanadi Tiger Reserve for the last 3 months. The alert of the real-time movement of elephants in the area of 10 km has been successfully sent on the mobiles of the villagers.
• Mobile numbers and GPS locations of the villagers are registered in this app. When the elephant movements are inputted on the app by the elephant trackers, alerts are automatically sent to the mobiles of the villagers by the app.
• Hathi Mitra Dal members use the ODK app (open source) to feed the location, herd names, behaviour and other characteristics of elephants. This ODK app works in both online mode (real-time) and offline mode (near-real time when trackers are out of mobile network area).
• The alert and tracking app can track the route of elephant presence using time period filters, filter the herd of elephants and track different routes (e.g. Sikasar Dal, Chanda Dal etc.).
• This app can be used not only to send alerts about the presence of elephants but also other carnivorous, omnivorous animals (leopard, sloth bear), and wild buffaloes, for research, housing development, planning & tracking as per requirement.