Two years after a team of students first imagined an innovative elephant collar, the prototype’s implementation is still in the works.

The collar, which is intended to help manage and discourage destructive elephant behavior in South Africa, was a collaborative effort between engineering and textiles students starting in 2013. Students involved with the program were given the problem as part of a senior project.

The waterproof, solar-powered collar tracks elephants, steering them away from village borders. By emitting certain vibrations and sounds, it takes advantage of elephants’ natural fear: bees.

“When an elephant approaches a restricted area the sound goes off first,” Caryn Siggins said. “If the elephant turns away, the collar stops making noise. If the elephant continues toward the village, the sound and vibration go off simultaneously to turn the elephant away from the village.”

Elephants’ natural tendencies make measures like these a necessity.

“The biggest concern is elephants’ certain migration patterns,” said Samantha Jeffrey, 2015 textile engineering graduate who headed the project in 2014-2015. “They’re wild animals. If an elephant smells fresh water, it finds the water, they find crops looking for food … they destroy the fresh water supply and the crops. They’re destroying property.”

The elephants’ sheer size is directly proportional to the destruction they create, leading to a huge impact on the livelihood of entire populations. Understandably, locals retaliate. This retaliation can lead to more problems. Not only does the violent action lead to a diminished population of already threatened elephants, but also it also inevitably leads to human harm.

The designers of the collar aim to reduce these human-elephant conflicts by rerouting the elephants’ paths using a combination of GPS and technology similar to underground fences. This is the short-term power of the collar. In the long term, the collar demonstrates more potential. By tracking elephant movement, data can be collected concerning poaching sites and elephant migration patterns. Information from this can lend insight into marking potential natural parks.

The collar is just one of many ways researchers hope to reduce conflict and eliminate poaching.

According to National Geographic, a study led by George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, concluded that three-quarters of local elephant populations are declining due to ivory poaching.

“There’s never going to be a silver bullet that resolves human-elephant interaction and solves poaching,” Jeffrey said. “There’s going to have to be so many different projects — different technologies. You have to approach it from a bunch of different angles. The collar is just one tool in the toolbox.”

At this point, the collar is not yet actively in use. Before it’s released, several factors need to be taken into consideration. For one, the influence it could have on the elephant population needs to be defined further, looking into potential effects on mating and migration. Additionally, the collar design needs to be compatible with South Africa’s environment. Researchers also have to weigh in on production potential.

Further field tests intend to clear up these complications.

“The nonprofit institute on campus was working with me, seeing if there are more paths to take the collar down — specifically in terms of a potential business model and opportunity to improve the technology,” Jeffrey said.

At this time, there is no specific end point for the collar, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still moving forward. Jeffrey and Siggins recently attended a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa, to hear feedback on the concept and discuss it in a larger sense as related to poaching.

The collar’s technology and mission continues to develop through addressing needed changes and by identifying the end user.

“It’s definitely not forgotten; there is still an immense need [for the collar],” Jeffrey said.