DEHRADUN: India’s first nationwide DNA-based census has found the country’s wild elephant population fell by about 25% in eight years, underscoring growing threats from shrinking forests and rising conflict with humans. Released on Tuesday, the report, ‘Status of Elephants in India: DNA-based Synchronous All-India Population Estimation of Elephants’ (SAIEE 2021-25), estimated 22,446 elephants across India, down from 29,964 in 2017. The exercise, led by Wildlife Institute of India, marks a shift from older counting techniques to a more scientifically robust DNA markrecapture method. Project Elephant, launched in 1992 to protect the animals and their corridors, had earlier gone by visual or dung-based counts. However, experts have long warned that these older methods lacked rigour in l

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