When elephant biologist Seema Lokhandwala, with the Elephants Acoustic Project, visited a village near Balipara in India’s Assam state, as part of her fieldwork in December 2015, she witnessed firsthand what it takes to live alongside elephants. After night fell, a herd of 150 elephants — “I counted them,” she says — devoured all of the freshly harvested rice stacked outside a woman’s house. Her entire year’s harvest, gone in minutes. Then, the giants ravaged her kitchen looking for salt, a mineral they need to survive, while the residents hid under the bed fearing for their lives. Just the previous night, elephants had mauled and killed a woman with three young children just across the street. That night left Lokhandwala shattered, but also resolved. That’s when she began thinking of ways to address the increasing human-elephant conflict that often leaves behind a trail of deaths. Assam, in India’s northeast, is one of the few remaining strongholds for Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the country, with a stable population of nearly 6,000 individuals. It’s also the most populous state in the region, with more than 31 million people. Not surprisingly, Assam has one of the highest incidences of human-elephant conflicts. “Space is a constraint, and humans and elephants both need space,” says Kaushik Barua, a wildlife conservationist and founder of the NGO Assam Elephant Foundation. “It’s basically a land war between humans and elephants, unfortunately.” Expanding farmlands and increasing human settlements have encroached on what used to be elephant corridors. Linear…This article was originally published on Mongabay