The African forest elephant lives in the humid tropical forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin, and is considerably smaller than its savanna cousin.2 Numbers have fallen from around 700,000 to fewer than 100,000 over several decades,2 and in 2021 the species was listed as Critically Endangered.1 Gabon holds the largest stable population.2
Forest elephants are the gardeners of the rainforest. They swallow large fruit and carry the seeds more than 5 km before dropping them, and 14 of 18 megafaunal tree species studied depend on them to spread.2 Protecting them also helps the forest keep storing carbon.2
Poaching for ivory and bushmeat is a major threat across Central Africa, alongside forest cleared for plantations and settlements.2
In dense forest, elephants are easier to hear than to see: they keep in touch with low-frequency rumbles.2 Our acoustic monitoring work finds those rumbles in months of recordings from forest microphones, so researchers can follow where elephants move without ever seeing one.
Conservation efforts struggle to monitor forest elephants in dense rainforests, with acoustic monitoring providing a promising solution via accurate, user-friendly detection systems that aid in population monitoring and anti-poaching efforts while mitigating human-elephant conflicts.
Listening to African forests to detect and classify elephant rumbles from audio recordings.
Learn how to leverage audio processing to localize elephant rumbles on terabytes of data.
Every project here was built hand in hand with conservation partners, and much of the code is open source. If our work fits a challenge you're facing, or you'd like to build something together, we'd love to hear from you.
