India’s 2018 Tiger Census has made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for being the world’s largest camera trapping wildlife survey. Almost 75% of total tiger population in the world are in India with around 2,900 tigers as was extrapolated by the census.
Daily Current Affairs Quiz 2020
Key-Points
The fourth iteration of the survey conducted in 2018-19 was the most comprehensive to date, in terms of both resource and data amassed.
Camera traps (outdoor photographic devices fitted with motion sensors that start recording when an animal passes by) were placed in 26,838 locations across 141 different sites and surveyed an effective area of 121,337 square kilometres (46,848 square miles).
In total, the camera traps captured 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife (76,651 of which were tigers and 51,777 were leopards; the remainder were other native fauna).
From these photographs, 2,461 individual tigers (excluding cubs) were identified using stripe-pattern-recognition software.
Tiger Sanctuaries in India
An evaluation of India’s 50 tiger sanctuaries was also released along with the 4th National Tiger Estimation (Tiger census).
Madhya Pradesh’s Pench Sanctuary and Kerala’s Periyar sanctuary emerged as the best-managed tiger reserves in the country.
Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu registered the “maximum improvement” since 2014.
The Dampa and Rajaji reserves, in Mizoram and Uttarakhand respectively are at the bottom of the list in terms of Tiger count.
No tiger has been found in the Buxa (West Bengal), Palamau (Jharkhand) and Dampa (Mizoram) reserves.