Thiruvananthapuram: A three day joint wild elephant count by south India states will begin from Thursday.
Forest official of Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh will be carrying out the enumeration. It is for the first time that a joint elephant count by the south Indian states is being carried out so as to get a foolproof data on the number of elephants in the region.
The decision in this regard was taken by an inter-state coordination committee of forest officials formed recently following the back to back instances of wild elephants claiming human lives at Wayanad that shares borders with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Kerala principal chief conservator of forest and chief wildlife warden D Jayaprasad told DH that the joint exercise could help in minimising redundancy caused during separate counting by each state owing the movement of elephants in the forest areas of one state to the other.
He also said that three types of counting will be conducted from Thursday to Saturday so as to ensure utmost accuracy. Kerala would be also feeding the data on elephants too on the tiger monitoring app, M-STrIPES (Monitoring System for Tigers, Intensive Patrolling and Ecological Status).
On the first day on Thursday a block level counting will be conducted. A team of three to five officials will count the elephants in each block with an area of four to six square kilometre each. In Kerala there are 610 blocks in the four elephant reserves.
On day two dung based counting will be carried out and on day three water hole counting in which elephants visiting water bodies will be counted. The data from states will be compiled and a draft report will be prepared by June and the final report will be ready by July.
A water hole counting done last year estimated the number of wild elephants at 2386.