The human elephant conflict in Sri Lanka has been a cause of major concern over the past decade. Frequent clashes between wild elephants and villagers have resulted in severe damage to property, as well as loss of lives for both humans and elephants. Competition for space is the primary reason for conflict between humans and elephants. Elephants that escape from the wildlife national parks venture into villages creating destruction in their wake. To prevent such mishaps, a proper system is required to contain and monitor elephants in national parks. In this project, we describe different approaches to detect elephants and possible ways of monitoring the national wildlife parks. We also elaborate on the advantages and limitations of each approach, and determine what sort of system is needed to tame the human elephant conflict.

The human-elephant conflict is one of the most severe natural problems in Sri Lanka. There are rich farmlands near the elephant habitats and elephants raid these farms in search of food. This has been the main cause for nearly 70 human deaths and over 200 elephant deaths that have been recorded each year in the recent past. To manage the problem, the government has initiated projects that secure the national wildlife parks with electric fences. However, maintaining the electric fence is a challenge, because of its large perimeter and the lack of available manpower. A particular concern is that of locating faults in electric fences since these typically span a few hundred miles. Currently, park rangers are required to travel on foot to locate the faults, which could take days to complete. In this project, we propose a novel system architecture that considerably shortens the maintenance time for electric fences, at minimal and hence affordable cost. Our architecture benefits the park rangers of the national wildlife sanctuaries to detect and repair the breakages.