This estimation will also cover Dang forest in northern most Western Ghats, Gujarat, where local conservationists have claimed to have found presence of transient tigers
The All-India tiger population estimation, 2018, a quadrennial exercise, is going to be more expansive and precise this time. The country-wide exercise will see installation of as many as 15,000 camera traps to capture tiger photos and an area of 4 lakh sq km will be surveyed across 50 tiger reserves. The 2018 estimation will also see installation of camera traps in northeastern states for the first time, other than Assam, even at places as high as 3,200m in Arunachal Pradesh, to improve efficacy of population estimation.
This estimation will also cover Dang forest in northern most Western Ghats, Gujarat, where local conservationists have claimed to have found presence of transient tigers. Scientists said these tigers may have crossed over to Gujarat from Melghat in Maharashtra. The entire exercise will be led by National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, along with field officers of state forest departments.
The use of camera traps is one of the key components of the estimation exercise, as it helps to establish presence of individual tigers in India’s forests and prevents duplication through identification of the each tiger’s unique stripes.
The quadrennial tiger population estimation uses the double sampling method. This combines field surveys, where tiger pugmarks, scat and DNA is marked and collected, and the camera trapping method. The individual tiger numbers from photos and data from ground surveys is used to extrapolate and arrive at the final tiger population estimate.
“Even as we plan to install more camera traps in Northeast, it is to largely capture prey abundance. If we do get tiger photos, that is well and good. But the forests in this region are dense and tiger density is low, so we will have to rely on a combination of scat, DNA analysis and prey abundance to arrive at a population estimate,” said Dr.YV Jhala, one of the lead scientists of the estimation from WII.
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