When elephant biologist Seema Lokhandwala, with the Elephants Acoustic Project, visited a village near Balipara in India’s Assam state, as part of her fieldwork in December 2015, she witnessed firsthand what it takes to live alongside elephants.

After night fell, a herd of 150 elephants — “I counted them,” she says — devoured all of the freshly harvested rice stacked outside a woman’s house. Her entire year’s harvest, gone in minutes. Then, the giants ravaged her kitchen looking for salt, a mineral they need to survive, while the residents hid under the bed fearing for their lives. Just the previous night, elephants had mauled and killed a woman with three young children just across the street.

That night left Lokhandwala shattered, but also resolved. That’s when she began thinking of ways to address the increasing human-elephant conflict that often leaves behind a trail of deaths.

Assam, in India’s northeast, is one of the few remaining strongholds for Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the country, with a stable population of nearly 6,000 individuals. It’s also the most populous state in the region, with more than 31 million people. Not surprisingly, Assam has one of the highest incidences of human-elephant conflicts.

“Space is a constraint, and humans and elephants both need space,” says Kaushik Barua, a wildlife conservationist and founder of the NGO Assam Elephant Foundation. “It’s basically a land war between humans and elephants, unfortunately.”

Expanding farmlands and increasing human settlements have encroached on what used to be elephant corridors. Linear infrastructure — roads, rail tracks and power lines — crisscross these corridors as well, obstructing elephant movement and endangering their lives. Fences erected in the landscape funnel these animals away from the corridors and toward villages.

Then, there’s climate change messing up weather patterns, leading to erratic rainfall. This year, Assam declared drought in five districts, including three that have elephants. When floodplains don’t flood like they should, elephants, which need about 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of vegetation every day, aren’t able to find enough food in the forests, so they come for crops.

According to a 2025 report, elephant encounters from 2000-2023 led to the death of 1,468 people and 1,209 elephants in Assam. Just over half of those elephant deaths came at the hands of humans. In the last five years alone, more than 300 people have died in encounters with elephants in the state.

“They’re not just statistics,” Lokhandwala, now a Ph.D. scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, says about these deaths. “There is a story behind [each death].”

Over the past decade, the engineer-turned-conservationist has worked in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park to prevent these deaths by designing a first-of-its-kind device that eavesdrops on elephant conversations.

The small, battery-operated device, which she calls an “elephant call detector and deterrence system,” has sensors that use artificial intelligence to detect elephant calls in the wild. It then responds by playing threatening noises over a speaker to shoo them away. Lokhandwala’s work has garnered the support of local communities and the state’s forest department, and international recognition as a finalist for the 2025 Pritzker Award.

Eavesdropping on elephant talk

Asian elephants are a very social species, with individuals and groups splitting or merging based on food availability and environmental conditions. They rely on low-frequency sounds and smells to communicate with each other as they traverse long distances looking for food.

“Asian elephants are extremely diverse in their vocalizations,” says elephant behavioral ecologist Shermin de Silva from the University of California, San Diego, who has spent more than two decades studying elephants. They produce 14 different kinds of vocalizations that scientists know of, she says. “They are socially very complicated, so it’s anyone’s guess what they’re saying to each other.”

Most recognize the characteristic trumpet call elephants make when they’re excited or agitated. But elephant talk also includes other noises. They make low-frequency rumbles that sound like a car engine; growls that resemble a dog growling or a cat purring; squeaks and squeals (also called chirps) unique to Asian elephants; and roars — the most visceral, prehistoric kind of sound. For example, the spine-chilling yowl of the Tyrannosaurus rex in the movie Jurassic Park was a baby elephant’s roar. A conversation can include a mix of these.

While scientists are still figuring out what exactly these pachyderms are talking about, they have a fair idea of why they use some calls. Elephants use rumbles and growls, for instance, when interacting with others in their herd.

“If they have to go inside a farm or come into the human landscape … they’re using these infrasonic calls and calling one another, and then making these huge herds,” Lokhandwala says.

It’s these sounds Lokhandwala is trying to listen to with her device because they hint at the presence of a herd. If she can disperse the elephants, the thinking goes, she can possibly avert a crop raid or them storming into a village. Potentially even save lives.

The elephant call detector and deterrence system uses AI to pick out elephant calls from the din of the forest. Once it detects these sounds, it then randomly plays back one of the following prerecorded sounds: tiger and leopard roars; buzzing bees; or the rumbles of a bull elephant in musth, when it becomes hyper-aggressive, which is known to scare other elephants. The device picks a sound at random to throw in a bit of a “surprise element,” Lokhandwala says, so elephants don’t get used to the same sounds and stop fearing them.

Since 2019, Lokhandwala and her team have built around 10 devices. They installed the first units in 2023 in and around Kaziranga National Park. After a few improvements, in 2024, the team found the devices were about 80% accurate in detecting elephant calls and 100% successful in deterring them, Lokhandwala says.

Each device costs around 50,000 rupees (about $570) to build. This drops to 15,000 rupees ($170) for just the deterrence system (the component that plays back the threatening noise). The cost rises to 300,000 rupees ($3,400) when the detection unit is also fitted with a camera to recognize elephants.

The devices are already helping communities around the park, so much so that the Assam Forest Department has asked Lokhandwala to make more of them. But finding the money to do so is challenging, as she currently relies on small grants to keep her work going. Recently, forest officials have asked her to submit her proposal as part of Project Elephant, a nationwide elephant conservation initiative. Farmers in other countries have also reached out to learn more about her device.

Lokhandwala says her AI elephant deterrence device is a better alternative to existing approaches in Assam to mitigate human-elephant encounters, such as an app-based alert system and “solar fences” — solar-powered sensors that similarly detect elephant presence, but broadcast an alarm to alert humans in the area rather than scare away the animals. Solar fences also require regular maintenance, which can be expensive, and not everyone in the region has access to a smartphone to receive app alerts.

While Lokhandwala’s device is currently built to respond to elephants, she says they can be tweaked for other wildlife, such as tigers — another animal frequently encountered by humans in India. She says she’s also excited about using it to detect rhino poaching — a conservation concern in Asia and Africa. When poachers shoot rhinos, it’s very difficult for authorities to know precisely where the shot was fired. With acoustics, Lokhandwala says, the device can pinpoint the location, so that authorities can arrive to nab the poachers. But money remains the constraint.

Will the device prevent all conflicts with elephants? Lokhandwala is quick to say no. “I would never say that we reach that stage where there wouldn’t be a single conflict,” she says. But her innovation is an attempt to use technology as an enabler in preventing these conflicts. It needs to go hand-in-hand with other approaches to tackling the problem, she says.

Addressing the root cause of conflicts

Generations of people have lived alongside elephants in Assam for millennia, mostly peacefully, because these generally gentle giants are shy and tend to avoid people. It was also easy to shoo them away from villages in the past — just making noise would let them know people are around, and they would turn away.

Over time, however, as the two species intruded deeper into each other’s spaces, these interactions have escalated into full-blown conflicts. But the approach to handling these escalations, so far, has been “buying time” and “using Band-Aid after Band-Aid after Band-Aid,” says Barua, who served as an honorary wildlife warden and is a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

As their habitats diminish and food sources dry up, elephants have become used to raiding rice fields, which they see as an easy source of nutritious food. People’s attitude toward elephants has also changed. In 2019, Lokhandwala and her team talked to 500 villagers around Kaziranga National Park to gauge their perceptions, and found that just 2% had a negative attitude, citing damage to their crops and houses. But in recent years, with the death toll rising, she says she’s noticed that negative perception has intensified. With many young people moving away from nature and losing the inherited knowledge of living with elephants, there’s also increased fear.

Lokhandwala also blames people’s use of social media. “People want to take these really funny videos of elephants going up close to them,” she says, adding that it puts their lives at risk. Plus, sensational news about deaths due to human-elephant conflict spreads faster on social media, often demonizing the animals and spreading fear.

But she also acknowledges that living in elephant country isn’t easy. “The fear of living, sleeping in a landscape where you know that an elephant can come inside the house and break the house … it’s a different kind of fear,” she says. “Your sleeping patterns have changed, your livelihood has been affected … people really need to appreciate villagers and farmers who actually do that.”

At the center of these conflicts lies the issue of land use, and unless that’s changed, there’s no magic bullet, says UCSD’s de Silva, who works with communities in Sri Lanka as part of her NGO, Trunks and Leaves.

“Human elephant conflict is not really about the elephants versus the people,” she says. “It’s often elephants versus development.”

This issue is usually perceived from a human viewpoint, but Lokhandwala’s innovation flips it on its head, providing a glimpse into how elephants perceive the world by listening to them, quite literally.

“We are a very visual species, and we don’t listen enough,” she says. “If we listen to the planet, it can help to improve the health of the planet.”

Banner image: An elephant in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park. India’s Assam state has one of the highest incidents of human-elephant conflicts. Image by Travelure via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Spoorthy Raman is a staff writer at Mongabay, covering all things wild with a special focus on lesser-known wildlife, the wildlife trade, and environmental crime.

Citations:

Schulte, B. A., & LaDue, C. A. (2021). The chemical ecology of elephants: 21st century additions to our understanding and future outlooks. Animals, 11(10), 2860. doi:10.3390/ani11102860

Basari, N. N., Sata, N. M. F. A., Mohamed, N. N. Z., Zamri, N. F. N., Samsudin, N. H., Shamrie, N. M. F., . . . Zaidi, N. a. H. M. (2025). Threatening sounds as an alternative mitigation method to deter elephant: A study in Elephant Conservation Centre, Kuala Gandah, Pahang, Malaysia. Tropical Life Sciences Research, 36(1), 43-56. doi:10.21315/tlsr2025.36.1.3

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