In the land of tigers, prey animals like deer and monkeys are often the first to sound the alarm when they sense the predator’s presence. Forest communities in Nepal, where the success of tiger conservation has come at the cost of rising human-tiger conflict, have long known to listen for these natural alerts. This local wisdom inspired a recent pilot project using sensors dotted around a forest to detect these alarm calls and send out automated alerts telling people where tigers or leopards might be prowling, reports contributor Praveen Kumar Yadav for Mongabay. The developers said they’d hoped it could be deployed to prevent tiger attacks in the region, but they didn’t have the chance to find out: the project ended for lack of support. Nepal’s wild tiger population recently reached a record 429 individuals, with 112 residing around Bardiya National Park in the southwest. That increase has come at a cost: Between 2010 and 2024, there were 245 tiger attacks on humans, resulting in 141 fatalities, according to a recent study. To reduce encounters, researchers deployed solar-powered acoustic monitoring devices in the Dalla Community Forest, near Bardiya, between December 2024 and March 2025. These devices, costing roughly $50 each, ran an artificial intelligence model trained to listen to sounds coming from the forest and identify alarm calls from chital deer (Axis axis), rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), and gray langurs (Semnopithecus hector). Communities in Bardiya, who share the same landscape as tigers to graze their livestock and collect firewood and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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