Direction 01
A corridor-alert network for Coimbatore-district villages: verified elephant sightings propagate along movement paths with SMS fallback
Sustainable Development Goal 15 / 17
Life on Land
Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. For builders: tools that watch forests, reduce human-wildlife conflict and support the people restoring degraded land.
Why this goal matters
Terrestrial ecosystems fail quietly and locally — a wetland filled here, a corridor fenced there — long before the losses aggregate into headlines. The people best placed to notice are local: farmers, forest-fringe villages, restoration volunteers. Tools that let local observation accumulate into credible evidence change what can be protected.
The Indian context
India packs megadiverse ecosystems and 1.4 billion people into the same landscapes, making human-wildlife coexistence a daily negotiation rather than a wilderness ideal. Elephant, leopard and blackbuck conflict, degraded commons awaiting restoration, and urban biodiversity under construction pressure all define the Indian version of this goal.
Tamil Nadu, specifically
The Western Ghats along Tamil Nadu’s western edge — directly above Coimbatore — are a global biodiversity hotspot with active elephant corridors running through farm and estate country; crop damage and fatal encounters are a lived reality in Coimbatore district. Chennai’s Pallikaranai marsh shows the urban-wetland fight; sacred groves and eri commons show restoration potential statewide.
People and communities affected
- Forest-fringe farming villages
- Estate and plantation workers in the hills
- Tribal and forest-dwelling communities
- Restoration volunteers and watershed groups
- Urban residents losing wetlands and tree cover
Key challenge areas
- Human-wildlife conflict early warning
- Ecosystem and land-use change detection
- Community restoration measurement
- Urban biodiversity accounting
- Grassland and wetland monitoring
The AI Lens
Where AI belongs here — and where it does not.
Where AI can meaningfully help
- Elephant-movement alerting from camera traps, sightings and historical corridor patterns
- Land-use change detection from satellite time series over wetlands and commons
- Species identification from citizen photos and acoustic recordings
- Restoration progress measurement from repeat photography
Where AI may be inappropriate
- Poacher-drone fantasies without enforcement partnerships — leave interdiction to authorities
- Wildlife-location publication that poachers can exploit
- Conservation scoring that overrides forest-dweller rights
Build Directions
Example problem directions
Starting points, not prescriptions — the strongest submissions narrow one of these into a specific, evidenced local problem.
Direction 02
A wetland sentinel that flags fill-and-build encroachment on urban lakes from open satellite imagery
Direction 03
A restoration diary for volunteer groups: geo-anchored repeat photos scored for green-cover change
Direction 04
An acoustic bird-survey tool that lets any campus run a standing biodiversity baseline
Potential users
- Forest-fringe communities and FPO groups
- Forest-department field staff
- Restoration NGOs and volunteer collectives
- Researchers and citizen scientists
Possible datasets
- Open Sentinel/Landsat imagery for change detection
- GBIF and eBird open biodiversity records
- Forest Survey of India published assessments
- Community sighting logs from your pilot, with governance agreed
Data-access limitations
- Sensitive species locations must be blurred or delayed by design
- Citizen-science data has strong observer bias; correct for it before claiming trends
- Canopy-level change hides understorey loss; satellite claims have limits
Privacy, bias and safety risks
- A missed elephant alert can be fatal; a false one erodes response — design both error costs explicitly
- Monitoring tools can criminalise subsistence use if deployed without community voice
- Restoration metrics can be gamed by planting counts; measure survival, not ceremonies
Responsible-AI considerations
- Involve forest-fringe communities as owners, not sensors
- Sensitive-location protection built into the data model
- Verification pathways with forest-department protocols for anything safety-related
Suggested impact metrics
- Alert accuracy and lead time in the pilot corridor
- Hectares under verified monitoring or restoration tracking
- Sapling survival or green-cover delta measured across seasons
Related SDGs
Related challenge areas
Participant resources
Build for Life on Land.
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