Individual elephants, not populations: a practical approach to managing human–elephant interactions in a plantation landscape in southern India

India holds nearly 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and much of their range is shared with people; negative human–elephant interactions (HEIs) cause approximately 500 human deaths in India each year. Forest department staff and local residents have knowledge of specific individual elephants that are tolerant of people, but this knowledge is rarely used systematically in management. With the practical aim of supporting forest managers, individual elephants were identified and observed in Gudalur, a plantation landscape of approximately 580 km 2 in the Nilgiris, southern India, between December 2015 and December 2016. Reports from forest department field staff were used to locate elephants, which were then observed directly (163 observations, 267 h); camera traps were used at one site. A total of 125 elephants were identified and classified into four behavioural categories using simple descriptive thresholds: rarely seen (58 elephants; 46.4%), seen often but away from habitation (50; 40.0%), showing “fight or flight” responses to people (7; 5.6%), and habituated, that is, tolerant of people (10; 8.0%). The male:female ratio was 1:0.7, compared with approximately 1:4 in other southern Indian populations, and one family unit’s home range was 29.3 km 2 . All seven fight or flight elephants were males, six of them younger than 30 years. These elephants are the most likely to be involved in negative HEIs, whereas the well-known habituated elephants showed no aggression towards people. Focusing management on a small number of individuals is more tractable than attempting to manage a whole population. This approach has since informed national guidance on identifying and profiling individual elephants in India, and the monitoring tool developed from it is used by three state forest departments.