Elephant Crop Heists in India
Category: Community Engagement Poster
Author(s): Alaina Wray
Presenter(s): Alaina Wray
Mentors(s): Veronica Yovovich
As elephant habitat is fragmented and human populations grow in India, human-elephant conflicts over elephants' crop raiding have risen. This has led to a complex challenge for land managers, farming communities, and elephant conservation. This poster will aim to explore this conflict, focusing on different stakeholders, causes, and solutions. These stakeholders include farmers, village members, India's government, India’s Forest Department, conservation groups, and poachers. Causes include the growing human population, fragmented habitat, loss of habitat, poor infrastructure to protect farms, and the low-cost vs benefit for elephants to eat crops. This poster will ultimately aims to discuss management solutions that keep the elephants out of farms with a techniques that raises the safety of the farming community, does not harm the elephants, protects crops, is cost-effective, and is long-term.