India, Oct. 14 -- The first-ever DNA-based All India Synchronous Elephant Estimation (SAIEE 2021-2025) has revealed that Northeast India is home to the country's second-largest elephant population, with an estimated 6,559 wild elephants, marking a major advance in India's wildlife science and monitoring efforts.

Conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) under Project Elephant, the survey adopted cutting-edge genetic mark-recapture techniques, identifying individual elephants through DNA extracted from dung samples collected across 15 sites in the region.

This marks the first time India has employed molecular methods to estimate elephant populations - replacing conventional dung-count surveys - to achieve greater precision in un...