Training held for frontline forest personnel ahead of elephant census in NE states

Guwahati, Oct 25 (IANS) Ahead of the ‘Synchronised Elephant Population Estimation’ in the entire northeastern region, a two-day Training of Trainers (ToT) program was organised at Kaziranga National Park & Tiger Reserve (KNP & TR) in Assam for the effective conduct of the elephant population census.

KNPTR Director Sonali Ghosh said that in the two-day (October 23-24) training, held at the national park, 70 frontline forest personnel from 28 forest divisions from Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland received training.

“The Project Elephant under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) would decide when the “Synchronised Elephant Population Estimation” would start in the northeastern states,” Ghosh told IANS.

She said that the Project Elephant under the aegis of the MoEFCC has been conducting the “Synchronised Elephant Population Estimation” across all elephant-bearing states of India every five years.

The current cycle is for the year 2023-24.

Another forest official told IANS that except in the northeastern states, the “Synchronised Elephant Population Estimation” has been completed in other northeastern states.

KNPTR Director said that as part of this initiative, Training of Trainers (ToT) was focused on key aspects such as sampling elephant encounter rates, determining group composition, and collecting dung samples for faecal DNA analysis.

She said that for the 2023-24 estimation, the methodology would be based on covariate-based Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture (SECR) modelling, using DNA from dung samples to individually identify elephants.

This approach mirrors the methodology successfully employed in the national-level tiger and leopard estimations, ensuring a robust, scientific basis for accurate population estimates.

The resource persons for the training were a team from the Wildlife Institute of India, including Bhim Singh, Shravana Goswami, Krishna Mishra, Manish Singanjude and Harshvardhan Singh Rathore.

The trainees were familiarised with the “MSTrIPE Spolygon” application that allows the user to record geo-referenced field observations and seamless data archiving to ensure minimal error in sampling.

According to the previous census, India is home to 27,312 elephants and of them, Assam is home to 5,719 elephants, the second largest pachyderm population in India after Karnataka (6,049).

Besides Assam, wild elephants also exist in Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and other northeastern states.

According to the India State of Forest Report-2019, Assam has only 36.11 per cent forest cover out of its total geographical area of 78,438 sq km.

Out of the total 28,327 sq km forest area, only 2,795 sq km comprises dense forest, while 10,279 sq km area is moderately dense forest.

Wildlife experts said that due to the depletion of forest cover in Assam and other northeastern states, habitats of all wild animals including elephants extensively destroyed leading to many problems including men-animals conflicts and damage of crops and other assets by wild animals, especially elephants.

(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujitchakrabortyne@gmail.com)

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