There are 3890 tigers in the wild today compared to 3200 in 2010

The number of tigers in the wld is on the rise and, today it stands at 3890 as compared to 3200 in 2010 - this has been made possible to decades of struggle for the species, according to conservationists. This growth in the tiger populations of India, Nepal, Russia and Bhutan can be attributed to factors like better surveying methods and conservation efforts as per wildlife charity WWF.
This has been reported in news.sky.com dated 11 April 2016.

In the words of Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International - 'for the first time after decades of constant decline, tiger numbers are on the rise. This offers us great hope and shows that we can save species and their habitats when governments, local communities and conservationists work together.'
The news is significant as it comes amid preparations for a meeting in India about tiger conservation. The meeting will assess the halfway point of the 12-year Tx2 plan - this plan encourages countries that have tigers to double the population by 2022.
Of course, the global decline has certainly been halted but there is still no safe place for tigers. It is feared that South East Asia is at imminent risk of losing its tigers if the governments do not take immediate action.
Thai authorities have hopes of continuing to increase the number of tigers at one of their national parks in Huai Kha Khaeng. It seems following a decade of studies using hidden motion-triggered cameras to track individual animals, researchers at the park have discovered that its population of wild Indo-Chinese tigers had increased from around 20 in 2006 to more than 50 today.
Environmental groups have called for putting an end of tiger farming by some countries - they kill the endangered animal for its skin and body parts for medicine.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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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.


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‘Save the Tiger’ campaign pays dividends – tiger population increases 30% in 4 years

#savethetiger #forestcorridors #bigcats Thanks to ‘Save the Tiger’ campaign, the numbers of the Big Cats have increased by 30% within the last 4 years. In the opinion of experts, over 5,000 tigers can be accommodated across Indian forests through effective protection. However, they feel that a manageable number would be between 3,000 and 3,500.
Of course, in order to sustain such a target it would require an economic agenda that would be sensitive to conservation. As Yadvendra Jhala, wildlife biologist at Dehradun's Wildlife Institute of India and one of the men behind the tiger census has indicated, the infrastructure development should be smart and green so that more numbers of tigers can be sustained.
He has pointed out that the biggest conservation challenge was to strengthen forest corridors in order to make it easy for the movement of tigers across forests. This is important because such movement allows for genetic diversity to local tiger populations and are believed to be key to their long-term survival.
However, most forest corridors are degraded and, in spite of that, the tigers continue to use those and migrate from one protected forest to another. Any further degradation would act like barriers.
Wildlife activists apprehend that forests would become a casualty and human-animal conflicts would rise and that is not wanted because the tiger is a symbol of our entire forests. There has to be smart infrastructure development that would be sensitive to the needs of both forests and wildlife. An example is the construction of roads through a green area - it should have overpasses and underpasses to allow free movement of animals.