The story so far: The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) released its report, the ‘Status of Elephants in India’, on October 14. The estimation of 22,446 elephants across four landscapes elicited comparison with the 2017 figure of 29,964, although the report said the DNA-based method, used for the first time to estimate elephants, “may be treated as a new monitoring baseline for further research”.

Why was the new methodology adopted?

The first elephant population estimation was conducted in 1929 across the forests of the United Province, comprising present-day Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Estimates till 1978 relied on the direct total count method, involving the averaging of figures obtained from three direct visual counts conducted at 10-day intervals at the forest beat level. The inc

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