Wildlife

INDIAN TIGER POPULATION RISES TO 2967, A RISE OF 33 PER CENT

Green Minute News

Home to majority of the world’s tiger population, the Indian tiger population has shown a whopping rise of 33 per cent in the last four years. Today, their numbers touch at 2967 with Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka taking the lead with more than 500 tigers each.

The All India Tiger Estimation, held every four years, has shown a healthy rise of 33 per cent in tiger numbers which is the highest ever recorded in the last decade. The rise in tiger population was 21 per cent during 2006-10 and 30 per cent during 2010-14.

Madhya Pradesh saw the highest number of tigers at 526, closely followed by Karnataka at 524 and Uttarakhand with 442 tigers. However, Chattisgarh and Mizoram saw a decline in their tiger numbers while Odisha maintained it numbers. The remaining tiger range states too have seen a positive trend.

In the Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) done for 50 tiger reserves across the five clusters of the country, the Pench Tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh and Periyar Tiger Reserve, Kerala have scored the highest score of 94 per cent which is categorized as very good.  In fact, 21 reserves have been judged as very good, 17 as good while 12 as fair.

Apart from this, all five important tiger landscapes show an increase in numbers with the Central landscape of MP and Maharashtra recording the highest increase. Lately, India has been estimating its tigers using a double sampling approach involving a mark-recapture framework to ascertain tiger numbers which has seen lot of improvements in the recent times.

The present tiger census, the data was collected using an Android based application – M-STrIPES (Monitoring system for Tigers’ Intensive Protection and Ecological Status) and analyzed on a desktop module. This greatly eased out analysis of a large quantum of data that was collected for over 15 months involving survey of 381,400 square kilometers of forested habitats, 522,996 km of walk by forest officials and laying of 317,958 habitat plots.

Besides cameras were placed in 26,760 locations which provided a total of 35 million images of wildlife including 76,523 images of tigers. These images were segregated in a short time using artificial intelligence software. In fact, 83 per cent of the tiger population images were captured wherein 2461 individual tiger photographs were obtained while only 17 per cent of the tiger population was estimated using robust spatially explicit capture re-capture statistical models.

THREE BIG TIGER STATES

State                         Numbers

Madhya Pradesh       526

Karnataka                   524

Uttarakhand               442

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