Good news for 'Save theTiger' brigade - their numbers could treble in next 20 years

The numbers of tigers could almost treble in the next 20 years if suitable action is taken to restore their natural habitat. At present, there are hardly 3,200 wild tigers left in the world and this is fewer than the number held in captivity in the US. These figures are released by the conservation group WWF.
This has been reported in news.sky.com dated 1 April 2016.

The tiger population had plummeted by 95% over the past century because of poaching, agriculture, and deforestation that had been considered necessary to make way for roads and railways. However, the striped predators could soon make a roaring comeback, as per scientists of University of Minnesota who conducted a new satellite image study.
The study indicated that there is still enough wild habitat remaining on Earth to allow a doubling of tiger numbers by 2022 - the next "Year of the Tiger" in the Chinese astrological calendar. And, the population "could approach a trebling" if conservation corridors are restored in the most deforested landscapes. These corridors are regions of preserved habitat that connect different areas which will allowing the large cats to avoid interbreeding.
The researchers had analyzed 14 years of satellite pictures tracking forest loss in the 13 countries where tigers still live.
The tiger is officially classed as "endangered" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and three of its subspecies are extinct. The fourth - the South China tiger - was last seen in the wild in the 1970s. These big cats used to roam across most of Asia, but now they have been confined to just 7% of their original range which are mostly in isolated forests.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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