Case Study: Dallas Zoo achieves real-time elephant behavior insights with Microsoft Power BI

Dallas Zoo - Customer Case Study

Dallas Zoo faced a challenge: traditional video and manual observation left big gaps in understanding how its elephants use the five‑acre Giants of the Savanna exhibit and how their behavior changed over time. To get accurate, long‑term behavioral data, the Dallas Zoo paired RFID ankle bracelets with the Microsoft cloud and analytics—including Microsoft Power BI—to replace short, error‑prone spreadsheets and limited 15‑day data windows.

With US Medical IT, the Zoo moved RFID feeds into a SQL Data Warehouse on Microsoft Azure and built Microsoft Power BI dashboards accessible on PCs, tablets, and watches. The solution delivers meter‑level location and movement tracking, shows each elephant walks an average of 10 miles a day (Congo nearly 17), enables multi‑year analysis, speeds detection of health issues, and helps optimize exhibit use—eliminating local system maintenance and producing insights now being sought by institutions worldwide.

Dallas Zoo

Nancy Scott

Coordinator of Elephant Behavioral Science