To minimise deaths, geophones along railway tracks to tap elephant movement

HARIDWAR: In a bid to avert incidents of elephants being killed by speeding trains, scientists and wildlife experts in the state have started laying geophones along railway tracks, frequented by the animal, which will trigger an alert whenever it senses a pachyderm movement. The frequency data is then sent to a central server which is monitored by the patrolling teams.
A geophone is a ground motion transducer that is used by geophysicists and seismologists to convert ground movement into voltage.Speaking to TOI, Bivash Pandav, senior scientist, Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, said, “We used movements of elephants at Rajaji National Park to gauge the effectiveness of the device. The geophones gave us a specific kind of signal whenever an elephant came close to the railway tracks. We are using the Earthquake Warning System which is deployed alongside Delhi metro lines.”
The pilot project, aimed at minimizing elephant deaths along railway tracks, is being conducted between Kansro and Motichur railway stations. Notably, 26 incidents of elephant deaths have been reported in the past three decades on this stretch, infamous as the ‘killer track’.
“We have so far installed about ten geophones at varied distances within 200 metres alongside the Kansro railway station. Now, we are planning to install geophones alongside the entire railway track passing through the Rajaji National Park area,” added Pandav.
To ensure that the alert sent by the geophone is of the movement of an elephant and not any other animal, hi-tech infra-red cameras are also installed along railway tracks. “To corroborate the signature sent by geophones, we have infra-red cameras which send us the images too. A robust Wi-Fi system is also being developed so that the data is simultaneously transmitted from central servers to train drivers and the patrolling staff,” said PK Patro, director, Rajaji National Park.
Meanwhile, scientists have maintained that the device doesn’t do away the need of physical patrolling of the tracks. “The device can only send signal of the presence of an elephant but ultimately the patrolling staff has to remove the pachyderm from the railway track as soon as information is disseminated,” cautioned Pandav.