| Elephant Conservation
Around 150 elephants and 50 people die every year as a result
of the human elephant conflict in Sri Lanka. So what do you do?
Put all the elephants in protected areas and fence them in? Unfortunately,
the thousands of elephants living outside cannot be stuffed into
a few protected areas. Therefore, we need to look for alternative
strategies for
elephant
conservation. |
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Tracking Elephants
How do you study elephants? Elephants are huge, so surely are
easy to find, observe and study? Unfortunately, that is far from
the truth. An elephant can be as secretive and quiet as a mouse
and just disappear into the forest like a ghost... Therefore,
we are
tracking elephants
using new GPS collars. |
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Awareness Program
How can we better mitigate the human-elephant-conflict? In Sri Lanka it causes the annual death of over 200 elephants and 70 humans. Through our research we learned a lot on how elephants respond to the currently used managment strategies. With an awareness program we want to explain our findings to the people. They are the ones who are asking for action! |
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Electric Fences
What would happen if an elephant touched an electric fence? It would get a ‘thundering shock’ that hopefully it will never forget and therefore will never touch a fence again! With this in mind we explore electric fencing as an elephant management strategy. |
| Social Organisation
Asian elephants were thought to have a similar social organisation
to African savannah elephants, with a very hierarchical complex
social structure. However, our research suggests that Asian elephants
have a very different social
organisation. |
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Tsunami Impact on Natural
Areas
The tsunami that impacted Sri Lanka on 26th December 2004 caused
massive loss of human lives and extensive damage to our infrastructure.
But what were its effects on natural eco-systems? Are natural
systems resilient enough to take it in their stride? Can tsunamis
be an important force in shaping coastal eco-systems? These are
some of the questions we want to answer through our tsunami
project. |
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