India, July 28 -- India could be in for more human-elephant encounters in the next four years, as pachyderm habitat is lost or becomes fragmented and rainfall patterns change, according to a new study.

The paper, Integrating Ecological Modelling and Local Knowledge to Understand Elephant Occurrence and Human-Elephant Interactions in the southern Western Ghats, analyses rainfall patterns, the presence of water bodies and land use changes from forest landscapes to agricultural fields to predict human-elephant interface from 2022 till 2030.

For this study, which was published in Environmental Management on July 10, 2026, scientists made use of 420 community interviews across the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala, along with sa...