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GUWAHATI
Karnataka, Assam, and Tamil Nadu relationship for 59.29% of the estimated 22,466 elephants successful India, a study released by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) successful Dehradun connected Tuesday (October 14, 2025) has revealed.
Seven northeastern States and a portion of West Bengal enactment 6,559 elephants, underscoring the region’s captious relation arsenic an elephant stronghold, the study titled ‘Status of Elephants successful India: DNA-based Synchronous All-India Population Estimation of Elephants’, said.
WII officials said the estimation from 2021 to 2025 was conducted utilizing the DNA-based mark-recapture method – akin to that utilized for the monitoring of tigers, co-predators, and prey – for the archetypal clip successful the country.
“Given the methodological changes, it is not comparable to past figures and whitethorn beryllium treated arsenic a caller monitoring baseline for further research, monitoring, and estimation,” the study read.
According to the findings, Karnataka leads with 6,013 elephants (range 4,792 to 7,235), followed by Assam with 4,159 (3,395 to 4,924), and Tamil Nadu with 3,136 (2,688 to 3,585) elephants. With 13,308 elephants, these 3 States person astir 60% of the country’s full population.
Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala (2,785 elephants) unneurotic person 11,934 elephants, which is 53.17% of the all-India estimate. These confederate Indian States are clubbed nether the Western Ghats landscape.
The North Eastern Hills and Brahmaputra Flood Plains landscape, comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and bluish West Bengal, offers the second-best situation for elephants. This scenery is location to 22.22% of India’s elephants.
The 2 different landscapes – the Shivalik Hills and Gangetic Plains (Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar), and Central India and the Eastern Ghats, comprising 7 States, including Andhra Pradesh and confederate West Bengal – relationship for 9.18% and 8.42% of the country’s full elephants.
Three phases
The survey was divided into 3 phases. The archetypal signifier progressive undertaking crushed surveys successful forested habitats crossed each tiger-bearing States to find which grids person elephant beingness and associated information.
Using a mobile application, carnivore and mega-herbivore motion encounters, ungulate (hoofed mammal) abundance, dung number of ungulates, vegetation presumption done situation plots, and quality disturbance were recorded. This accusation helped successful modelling elephant occupancy.
Phase Two progressive assessing situation characteristics and anthropogenic impacts, specified arsenic vegetation cover, wood spot size, quality footprint, region to nighttime lights, and nighttime airy intensity. Across the 6,66,977 km covered by the estimators connected foot, 21,056 dung samples were collected for the 3rd phase.
“After evaluating aggregate covariates associated with elephant density—including region to water, terrain ruggedness, normalised quality vegetation scale (April and November), proximity to nightlight sources, and quality footprint metrics from crushed surveys—the elephant brushwood complaint derived from Phases I to III information emerged arsenic the astir robust predictor for modelling elephant densities successful the Western Ghats and the Shivalik Hills-Gangetic Plains landscape,” the presumption study said.
“In Central India and the Eastern Ghats, some brushwood complaint and region to h2o were the astir informative covariates. In the northeast, elephant brushwood complaint (encompassing signs, sightings, and dung) from Phase I information demonstrated beardown predictive powerfulness for estimating elephant densities,” the study said.
