The state of Assam in northeast India is home to the second-largest Asian elephant population in India. The landscapes in Assam have rapidly transformed over the last two decades into a diverse mosaic of forests, crop fields, human settlements, and tea plantations that grow the famed Assam tea. Elephants and many other wildlife species are now finding their historical corridors and forest habitats fragmented and destroyed. This is pushing people and wildlife into closer proximity to each other, resulting in increased negative, and often dangerous interactions.
In 2021, in partnership with the Assam Forest Department, we shared our plan to fit elephants with GPS collars in key areas within the state to monitor their movement and understand important habitats, as well as the levels of conflict occurring with people, all in an effort to support informed conservation decision-making that benefits both elephants and people.
Meet the elephants
Since then, the first elephant, Tara, was collared in 2021, followed by three other female elephants over the next two years—Phul, Mynow, and Budhuni. The data collected from these collars has revealed how remarkably adaptable these elephants are, even as their habitats face increasing fragmentation and human encroachment. Most recently, in November 2024, a fifth elephant and first male, named Bishu, was collared.
By tracking the movements of these five collared elephants and their herds, we’re gaining valuable insights into how elephants navigate this fragmented landscape and how human communities respond to their presence. This knowledge will help us develop efforts to protect key habitats and movement corridors, as well as strategies to manage conflict and foster coexistence between people and elephants.
Unraveling movements
Tara and Phul
The first two collared elephants, Tara and Phul, and their herds spend much of the harvest season—from September to December—each year in Sonitpur district in northern Assam. In this area, human-elephant conflict occurs frequently during harvest season, when elephants that don’t reside year-round in these human-dominated areas arrive from parts unknown just in time to feed on the ripening rice gains. Until the collaring exercise, the biggest questions centered on why they arrive in this area during this period, where they go during other times of the year, and what the implications are of this movement on resulting human-elephant conflict.