Conservation and the Elephant Listening Project

The Elephant Listening Project is a not-for-profit organization associated with the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  ELP strives to study the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) through recordings of the forests that serve as their home, picking up both natural and unnatural sounds – not only the calls of elephants to each other, but also the sounds of human involvement.  Graduate and undergraduate students in a variety of fields have contributed to the analysis of this data.

“Over the last twelve years the project called ELP has found ways to discern key aspects of the forest elephants’ life experience (the sizes and composition of their herds, movements of populations from place to place, evidence of mating, maternal responses to infants, evidence of distress and flight, and of the gunshots and chainsaws that reveal poaching) by listening to the forest from fixed recorders in the trees.”

– Katy Payne
Living With Sound, February 2013.

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