Forest elephants are hard to see in dense forests, making aerial survey techniques impossible to use. Although they are hard to see, forest elephants frequently make sounds to communicate, often below the frequency that humans can hear. These low-frequency calls can travel far through forests, particularly the infrasonic frequencies. Researchers from the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) at Cornell University, led by Dr. Peter Wrege, study these calls to estimate forest elephant abundance in the Congo basin of Central Africa, the largest block of tropical rainforest outside of the Amazon.

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