How Cell Towers Could Save Forest Elephants

While there are many activists that believe cell towers pose a danger to animals, Ariel Schwartz, Senior Editor at Co. Exist, believes that this technology might just be able to save elephants in the rainforests of Southeast Asia whose population is rapidly declining. One time, their numbers were in the millions and now there are approximately 100,000 elephants living in the rainforest. Even though the rainforest isn’t the traditional place for elephants, there is a subset that lives there. The Elephant Listening Project, an initiative that records elephant vocal exchanges in an attempt to figure out what they’re doing, is engaged in the tricky work of eavesdropping on these animals without encroaching upon their remote habitats. According to Schwartz, “Cell phone towers can help in some instances, but getting data from the recorders in the forest to the cell towers–and then to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s computers–isn’t easy.” Director o the ELP, Peter Wrege, suggests that, “crowdsourcing of elephant sounds by nearby residents could also be useful, but the locals would first need to understand the sounds that they’re hearing–perhaps with help from a cell phone app. None of this will directly keep the elephants from being killed, but the hope is that understanding these elephant noises (and any nearby gunshots) will help officials to track down poachers. Whether that happens efficiently enough to save the elephants will depend on how quickly the ELP can find solutions to its technological quandaries.”