ELOC - Elephant Bioacoustic Monitoring & Research in the Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah

The ELOC (“Elephant Locator'') project aims at developing an acoustic detection system for Asian elephants. In the future, we hope that this new technology will substantially support both anti-poaching patrols (real-time tracking of elephants in high-risk areas) and human-elephant conflict mitigation (early warning system in conflict prone areas) in elephant range countries.

The idea of ELOC is to make use of the rich repertoire of elephant vocalisations, including low frequency rumbles, in order to automatically detect and locate elephants from a distance.

The objectives of the project is to:
1) test core components such as low cost recorders, software and an AI to identify and process recorded elephant sound, and technical solutions to forward the information to the end users (e.g. conservation department, ranger headquarters, community rangers etc.);
2) to research certain aspects of elephant biology connected to the detection process, such as the vocalisation frequency in various field scenarios (undisturbed habitat, conflict areas etc.) and land use types (e.g. fields and forest), differences in vocalisation between sexes and age classes, or the detection range (distance the vocalisations can be reliably recorded/detected).