Tigers have been driven to the brink of extinction, primarily by poaching for pelts, body parts and live trade, as well as by habitat loss. It is estimated that fewer than 3,500 tigers remain in the wild, of which about 1,000 are breeding females. They occupy only 6 percent of their historical range.

“A lot of effort has been focused on distributing efforts across a broad range, but we need to make sure that these source sites are absolutely protected from poaching, rather than spreading resources too thin,” said Wildlife Conservation Society Asia director Joe Walston, lead author of the study in PLoS Biology September 14.

The researchers identified 42 key tiger habitats through interviews with about 300 people working on tiger conservation on the ground, as well as by analyzing the published material on tiger populations, Walston said.

“If we don’t do what’s in this paper than we have nothing. But we have to do much more than that,” said World Wildlife Fund scientist Eric Dinerstein, who has done work on tigers but was not involved in this study.

“There is no reserve today that is big enough to maintain a genetically viable population of tigers,” he said. “We either need whopping big preserves, which is nearly impossible, or we need to manage tigers as a metapopulation — one big population that is linked by dispersal and habitat corridors.”

Maintaining continuous habitat corridors of forest is critical for keeping tiger populations interacting, since tigers rarely cross even a one or two mile forest gap, Dinerstein said. He added that the World Bank estimates 500 billion dollars per year will be spent building new infrastructure and roads in the tiger range over the next ten years. If governments wait to protect connecting forest corridors, they’ll soon be gone.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has organized a Tiger Summit for November where leaders of all countries with tiger habitat are expected to gather. Both Walston and Dinerstein hope this study will serve as a road map for guiding tiger conservation efforts set forward at the meeting.

The study estimates it it will require an additional $35 million a year to increase monitoring and enforcement efforts at the key habitat areas to enable tiger numbers to double over the next several years.

“Although the scale of the problem is huge, the complexity is not,” Walston said. “We’re really providing a demonstrably effective way of reversing the decline of the tiger. We’re taking lessons from where conservation has been going well and where it has not been going well.”

Tiger populations can rebuild quickly since they have litters of up to four or five cubs every year. As long as they are given space, food and continued protection from poaching over the long term, they will have a fast recovery, Dinerstein said.

Images: 1) Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society. 2) Kent Redford. 3) Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society.

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Authors: Jess McNally

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