India's Tiger Count 2018

The need of the hour is to safeguard our wildlife and its habitat, conserving the tiger is a measure of our commitment to conserving the life-support systems of the planet.

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Conserving tigers in a country with 1.36 billion people and simultaneously sustaining rapid economic growth, is a humongous task. A healthy tiger status is the litmus test for the success of our commitment to conservation. But assessing the status of tigers is by itself a mammoth exercise, and is undertaken every four years on a national scale since 2006. The 2018 tiger status estimation exercise covered forests of 20 Indian tiger states (3.8 lakh km2), with a ground survey effort of 5.23 lakh km, and remote camera deployment at 26,838 locations.

The exercise used state of the art technology and cutting-edge science to arrive at population estimates of tigers and other species. Data collection was done digitally, using a mobile phone application (M-STrIPES) that recorded the survey paths of forest guards using GPS satellites as track logs. Remote, thermal and motion sensitive cameras were also deployed. This data was then transferred and processed at the Tiger Cell of the Wildlife Institute of India by a team of 75 wildlife biologists using specially developed software (M-STrIPES desktop, CaTRAT, ExtractCompare and Hotspotter) to, (i) visualize and summarize survey data in a geographic information system, (ii) segregate millions of wildlife photographs to species and (iii) fingerprint tigers and leopards from their unique stripe and rosette patterns to identify individual animals. In areas with militancy (Maoist or Naxal), and where cameras could not be deployed, DNA extracted from tiger faeces was used to count individual tigers.