Dawn breaks to reveal the elephants’ damage: footprints the size of large woks puddled with rain, a wire fence mangled beyond repair, healthy tomato plants crushed, their ripe fruits oozing juice into the chocolate-colored mud. Imagine this is your farm; how would you respond?

To Krithi Karanth, the answer is simple: Pick up the phone!

“Spaces for wildlife are shrinking, and therefore you are putting people in closer contact with wildlife,” explains Karanth, a conservation biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and a National Geographic Explorer. And, “in some places, it is also an outcome of being successful at conservation, where you now have large, stable wildlife populations.”

From 2000 to 2010, the state of Karnataka, India, received over 100,000