Sumatran elephant research project

Our work on the critically endangered Sumatran elephant is starting to take off now with Gaius and Dr Abdullah's students from Syiah Kuala University having collected questionnaire information on human-elephant interactions in Acehnese villages over the summer and joining Rudi Putra's FKL's ranger teams on their 12-day treks through the forest to collect some elephant density information. We still have a long way to go on the elephant density information and HEC but hopefully Nicola's project in Leuser and Meryl's project in the Aceh region can further add to our slowly growing understanding of the elephants of the northern regions of Sumatra.

In November, Abdullah presented about the research progress to the RISTEK DIKTI (Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology). His presentation is available here.

Since 31st December BKSDA and Gaius have been very busy and have collared three wild elephants. All three elephants are part of herds that regularly visit villages and the GPS locations of them are being used to warn villagers of the imminent arrival of elephants. The collaring operations were funded by International Elephant Foundation (IEF), People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), , BKSDA (Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam), and generous funding in kind by the veterinary faculty of the University of Syiah Kuala (Banda Aceh, Indonesia) through support from Dr Christopher Stremme, Dr Wahdi and their teams. There are various news reports on these activities by Harian Aceh: Collar 1 near Cot Girek, Collar 2 in Mila, Collar 3. On facebook you can watch the video of the first collaring operation as created by Danurfan and Gaius.

The elephant population density and habitat use will be studied by BU's MRes student Nicola Collins using ground methods only (no GPS collars, just dung counts and transects). Whilst Meryl Thomas from UCL will do a survey of Human Elephant interactions and management strategies in Aceh.