14 DAY TRIAL // At this point, less than 4,000 wild tigers endure throughout Asia, despite the fact that the animals' habitats span no less than 13 nations. But conservationists say that the continent can support up to 10,000 of the animals by 2022, and they also provide a new strategy on how to do this.
There are several obstacles that hinder tiger conservation at locations around the world where the big cats live, and negative interactions with humans are chief among them. The felines either kill cattle, or attack villagers in areas next to their reserves, and people naturally want revenge.
Therefore, limiting these interactions, and providing incentives for people living around conservation sites to go on without killing the tigers is critically-important for the success of protection initiatives.
But perhaps even more important than this is that the existing reserves are managed at a large scale, rather than on a national basis, as they are today. For example, creating transnational corridors between key conservation areas could have tremendous effect.
Each protected tiger reserve, regardless of country, has a region that is designated as a core breeding site, where most of the animals come to meet their mates. Assuring that these core sites can communicate with each other unimpeded could be a major step forward for conservation efforts.
These are the conclusions of a study entitled “A Landscape-Based Conservation Strategy to Double the Wild Tiger Population,” which was developed by the world’s leading conservation scientists. The work appears in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Conservation Letters.
The paper marks the first time that the political commitment of the 13 nations hosting tigers on their territory is put to the test. Last November, all these nations proposed doubling the number of tigers in Asia by 2022, when the next Year of the Tiger begins.
Researchers demonstrated in the new work that the pledge the governments made are not only possible, but also leave room for improvements. However, Asian nations cannot be expected to carry the burden alone. With help from the developed world, tiger populations could be boosted significantly.
“In the midst of a crisis, it’s tempting to circle the wagons and only protect a limited number of core protected areas, but we can and should do better,” explains Dr. Eric Dinerstein, who is the Chief Scientist at World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-US.
“We absolutely need to stop the bleeding, the poaching of tigers and their prey in core breeding areas, but we need to go much further and secure larger tiger landscapes before it is too late,” he adds.
“Tiger conservation is the face of biodiversity conservation and competent sustainable land-use management at the landscape level,” says Smithsonian Conservation Research Institute expert Dr. John Seidensticker, who also participated in the study.
“By saving the tiger we save all the plants and animals that live under the tiger’s umbrella,” he concludes,” quoted by AlphaGalileo.