Introduction

Deforestation, rapid urbanization, farming, grazing of livestock, mining, logging, and drilling are some of the accelerated human activity around rural and forest peripherals. Hence, the boundary between the forest and the adjoining rural areas is constantly negotiated between humans and wildlife. Although this wildlife – human interaction affects all animal species, we chose to focus on designing automated alert systems that mitigate elephant-human interactions inspired by an idea put forth by Kishore Panangati, another participant of BioE271: Frugal Science, the global project class at Stanford this team was a part of in Sep-Nov 2020 (https://www.frugalscience.org/). In areas like Sakaleshpura - Alur region in Karnataka, India, where Kishore works, villagers are in constant fatigue over physical monitoring of the infiltration of elephants for crop raiding. A low-cost, reliable, semi-automated monitoring system will be of great benefit to both humans living in similar areas, and in reducing the harm caused to elephants because of measures that can cause them physical harm.

Problem statement

Using tools for detecting earthquakes such as geophones, scientists have observed and undocumented “seismic signatures” of elephant activities such as walking, snorting, running, and grunting. Geophones are expensive, reliability depends on the local soil conditions and deteriorations over time, and they require software development to automate signal processing and elaborate set-up.

Can we track elephants remotely with a low-cost sensing device and inform local villagers in advance?

Current solutions and drawbacks

Possible interventions

Geophones - Expensive, requires trained personnel to operate = not frugal

Woofers - Low cost, needs development of electronics.

Resonant strips - One for each Hz from 1-40. - Low cost, no electronics, no analysis, directly human readable. Vibration amplitude may be too low to be detected by the eye.

Optical Mouse - Low cost, easily available, ready for computer use!

What are the field requirements of a device:

  1. Should be able to detect elephant sounds from at least 1 km away