Where the Wild Elephants Are: Assessing the Distribution of Asian Elephants Using Media Reports

We present the first systematic use of news articles to map districts with wild Asian elephants in India. We analysed news articles mentioning human-elephant conflict between 2004 and 2018 and found that conflict was reported from 40 districts outside the elephant range published by IUCN, the only open data source for Asian elephant range in India. Sixteen of those districts reported multiple conflict incidents between 2004 and 2016, suggesting that the IUCN maps were outdated. Our analysis shows that news articles can be a useful tool forupdating range information for charismatic species.