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THE AFRICAN SAVANNAH: THE LARGEST LAND MAMMAL IN THE WORLD African savannah elephants are the largest land animals on Earth, with males (known as bulls) reaching a shoulder height of 13 feet. A noticeable distinction between African savannah and forest elephants is size - the savannah is larger and has bigger and more curved tusks. Asian elephants have much smaller ears than both African species and usually, only the male Asian elephant sports tusks African savannah elephants have large home ranges, spanning hundreds of square miles. As they move, they push over trees to get to their branches and roots, helping maintain the grasslands, and they use their tusks and trunks to dig for water, creating pools that many other animals need to survive. These elephants are important dispersers of seeds through their consumption of fruit. Habitat loss and poaching are the biggest concerns for the survival of elephants. As the human footprint has grown in Africa, elephant habitats have been converted to farmland, deforested by industrial logging and mining, and otherwise developed by roads and settlements.
By teaming up with Colchester Zoo, African elephants were also photographed and included in the database too. Physical differences between African and Asian elephants mean that it is essential to collect images of both to allow the tech to be used in different continents. Once trained with images the cameras can identify the creatures in real-time with varying levels of accuracy depending in part on how far away they are For example, Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants and their ears are smaller compared to the large fan-shaped ears of the African species. All the thermal photographs have been used to 'train' the camera technology to recognise what an elephant looks like by labelling the images collected. 'As you continue to train the camera, it should get even better at detecting elephants over time, ' said Davies. ZSL said the next step is to develop prototype cameras that can be deployed in the field with the help of conservation partners. Studies on conflict between elephants and humans in Asia and in Africa have identified crop raiding as the main form of conflict, according to WWF.