Tiger census kicks off with more cameras, mobile app

NEW DELHI: The largest survey of wildlife anywhere in the world has kicked off. Over the next few months, the all-India tiger census 2018 will use more technology, including a mobile app, with more intensive ground coverage and a higher focus on the northeast to determine the country’s big cat numbers.

The last census, in 2014, had estimated India’s tiger population at 2,226, up from 1,706 in 2010. Most experts expect the growth trend to continue. The results are likely to be announced early next year.

The basic census methodology — double sampling based on ground-based surveys for tiger signs and actual images captured on cameratraps, along with statistical extrapolation — remains unchanged. First introduced in 2006 after the previous “pugmark” surveys were found woefully inaccurate, the double sampling method had estimated India’s big cat numbers that year at just 1,411, ringing alarm bells around the world.


Giving details of this year’s exercise, officials from the National Tiger Conservation Authority and Wildlife Institute of India, which conducts the census, said on Tuesday that ground staff involved in the count will be using a mobile app, MSTrIPES, for the first time.

“The app records the staff’s path through the forest and helps upload geotagged pictures into the central database. This will make the exercise speedier and more accurate,” said Y V Jhala, senior WII scientist who heads the census.

This year’s count will use 14,000 camera traps for capturing tiger images, 4,300 more than in 2014. Individual tigers are identified from camera images through a software that records the animal’s unique stripe pattern. The last census had identified 1,685 tigers, 76% of the total, through images from camera-traps deployed in forests across India.

Another big focus of the census will be to cover northeast India intensively, which hopefully will provide more robust tiger numbers from the region. “Due to various reasons, including accessibility and the fact that tigers there are thinly spread over large areas, northeast wasn’t adequately surveyed in past counts although the entire region was covered. We intend to change that this time by using more cameras and gathering evidences like tiger scats from the ground,” said WII scientist Qamar Qureshi.

The census isn’t about the tiger alone. The 2014 exercise had resulted in the first ever estimate of India’s leopard population, which was put at 11,000. “This exercise will go further, giving us estimates of various carnivores, ungulates and other animals in India’s forests,” said Siddhanta Das, India’s director general of forests and special secretary in the environment ministry.