UK Zoos Hope ‘Elephant Selfies’ Will Help Protect Their Wild Elephant Cousins
Two British Zoos have been working together, photographing their resident elephants, to create a unique elephant database. They hope these elephant photographs will help reduce human/elephant conflict in the wild, in both Africa and Asia.
Colchester Zoo in Essex, and ZSL Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, have been collaborating on a project called HEAT (Human-Elephant Alert Technologies) using thermal cameras to identify the heat signature of elephants.
“We are so proud that our elephants can be involved in innovative work to contribute to the conservation of their wild counterparts!” said Colchester Zoo.
Colchester Zoo is home to ‘vulnerable’ African elephants (Loxodonta africana) whilst Whipsnade Zoo has a small herd of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) which are now classified as ‘endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
They have both set up cameras around their elephant enclosures, taking thermal pictures from different distances, at different angles, whilst the elephants are doing different things – such as reaching up to eat food and playing. Colchester Zoo has said that the images of their African elephants can also be compared to the 30,000 images of the Asian elephants at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, to detect differences in size and shape of the different species.
Thousands of thermal photographs have been collected, and are now being used to ‘train’ camera technology using unique heat signatures, so that it will be able to recognise what an elephant looks like. Currently, the ‘model’ created can confidently identify elephants, and people, up to 30 metres away.
“Our footage yielded some fantastic photos, perfect for confusing and then teaching the “model”, with our keepers in close proximity to the elephants whilst training and our elephants reaching up to feed off branches, thus presenting a different body shape for the technology to recognise so that it doesn’t falsely identify the image as that of a human.” Colchester Zoo.
The project’s ultimate aim is to develop a low cost early warning camera system that can be used in the wild. It it hoped it will be able to detect elephants during the day and at night, as it can ‘see’ thermal shapes of elephants in the dark. This will then send an alert text to local communities, to try and help prevent any human/wildlife conflicts. Their next step is to develop prototype cameras, before testing this new technology on the ground.
Human/Wildlife conflicts occur as human populations expand and animal’s natural habitats shrink, so people and wildlife are increasingly coming into conflict over living space and food. Within Zambia, and across Africa, a small scale farmer can lose their entire year’s crops in just one night due to an elephant raid, whilst sometimes lives are lost when trying to protect their crops. Sometime elephants are then killed in in retaliation or to prevent future raids.
The elephant alert system is being developed by the Arribada Initiative (a UK-based technology NGO), the Zoological Society of London, WWF Netherlands and WILDLABS (an online conservation technology network).