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As the compiled report of “Status of Tigers Co – predators & Prey in India, 2018” is released today ( 29th July ‘2019 ) by Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi on the occasion of International Tiger Day, Madhya Pradesh rejoices on once again being crowned the “Tiger State” of India.
India has a long-standing and successful track record of protecting its tigers. Tiger conservation is the collective responsibility of the government and the people. Our cultural legacy which encourages compassion” distance has played a important role in the conservation of tigers.
India is home to 60% of the Global tiger population which is reflective of our conservation initiatives which are totally grounded in science and suitably backed by a legal and financial framework. The fourth cycle of the all India tiger estimation has been successfully completed and shows a rise in tiger estimates.
In the era of modern development, conserving the tiger is the only real task. Ensuring the conservation of this topic only for guarantees the well-being of our forest article systems, the biodiversity their present in the water than climate security they provide. Monitoring the status of tigers, along with associated biodiversity of the encompassing system, is important to assess our success at meeting the commitment of conserving our natural heritage.
India’s national tiger assessment is the largest biodiversity survey being carried out anywhere in the world. The food cycle of the suspect was undertaken in 2018 and 2019 using the best available science, technology and another pickle tunes. In the cycle, recording of primary field data through mobile phone applications like M-STRIPES ( Monitoring system for Tigers – intensive protection and ecologically status ) that uses GPS to geo tag photo evidences, and survey information made this exercise more accurate, with smaller margins of human error. Further, it involves the development of innovative technology like automated segregation of camera trap photographs to species using artificial intelligence and neural network models.
That fingerprints tigers from their stripe patterns was used to count the number of individual tigers the unique feature of this cycle of assessment, in keeping up with digital India, is the development and use of innovative technology technological tools in collection and processing of data to reduce human errors.
The fourth cycle of National tiger status assessment of 2018-19 is the most accurate survey 2 conducted. The survey covered 381,400 km of forested habitats in 20 tiger occupied states of India. A foot survey of 522,996 km was done for carnivore signs and prey abundance estimation. In these forests, 317,958 habitat plots were sampled for vegetation, human impacts and prey dung. Camera traps were deployed at 26,838 locations. These cameras resulted in 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife of which 76,651 were of tigers and 51,777 were of leopards. The total area 2sampled by camera traps was 121,337 km . The total effort invested in the survey was 593,882 man-days. We believe that this is the world’s largest effort invested in any wildlife survey till date, on all of the above criteria. A total of 2,461 individual tigers (>1 year of age) were photo-captured. The overall tiger population in India was estimated at 2,967. Out of this, 83% were actually camera trapped individual tigers and 87% were accounted for by camera trap based capture-mark-recapture and remaining 13% estimated through covariate based models. Tigers were observed to be increasing at a rate of 6% per annum in India when consistently sampled areas were compared from 2006 to 2018 . Tiger occupancy was found to be stable at 88,985 km the country scale since 2014 (88,558 km ). Though there were losses and gains at individual landscapes and state scales. The occupancy reported in this report is based on latest forest cover by Forest Survey of India (2017) and therefore cannot be compared with earlier occupied areas which were computed from earlier forest cover data. To make the comparison on the same scale we have recomputed tiger occupied forests for the 2014 cycle on the forest cover of 2017. Reduction in occupied areas was due to a) not finding evidence of tiger presence in sampled forests (20% actual loss), and b) not sampling forests that had tiger presence in 2014 (8 %). New areas that were colonized by tigers in 2018 constituted 25,709 2(28%) km . This analysis suggests that loss and gain of tiger occupancy was mostly from habitat pockets that support low density populations. Such habitats with low density tigers, though contributing minimally to overall tiger numbers, are crucial links for gene flow and maintaining connectivity between source populations. The loss and gain of tiger occupancy in these marginal areas is a dynamic process and depends on several factors like proximity of a tiger source population, anthropocentric pressures operating in the landscape, associated change in habitat conditions and protection regime. Tiger occupancy has increased in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh. Loss in North East is due to poor sampling. Madhya Pradesh has also registered a substantial increase in their tiger population and along with Karnataka ranks highest in tiger numbers. The poor and continuing decline in tiger status in the states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha is a matter of concern.
Blue Print of the 2018 Census
2,967 : Total tiger population estimated in India
2,461 : Total number of individual tigers camera trapped
2,591 : Tiger population estimated through Capture-mark-recapture
Tiger Population in India
2006 : 1,411
2010 : 1,706
2014 : 2,226
2018 : 2,967
State Wise Tiger Population
2006 2010 2014 2018
Madhya Pradesh 300 257 308 526
Karnataka 290 300 406 524
Uttarakhand 178 227 340 442
Tamilnadu 76 163 229 264
Maharashtra 103 168 190 312
Rajasthan 32 36 45 69
Madhya Pradesh records an exemplary growth of 70% vis-a-vie last census of 2014.
The Best National Parks of Madhya Pradesh as per descending Tiger population :