IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Barlow, A.C.D. | |
| Monitoring tigers in the Sundarbans | |
| 2010 Current Conservation (3): 4-5 | |
Tracking changes in wild tiger numbers is essential for evaluating the impact of conservation strategies and for identifying emerging threats. Unfortunately, tigers are notoriously elusive, particularly so in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh and India; a globally important tiger landscape and the largest mangrove forest in the world. The Sundarbans is made up of a maze of thickly vegetated islands interspersed with tidal waterways that presents a unique set of challenges for counting tigers. Camera trapping has been used in other areas to estimate tiger abundance, but such efforts in the Sundarbans have been hampered by the lack of recognizable tiger travel routes, without which capture rate is too low to make sound conclusions. However, tigers crossing creeks in the Sundarbans leave distinct tracks on the muddy banks which can be used to infer relative abundance with a suitable sampling strategy and reasonable set of assumptions. Furthermore, the fact that the track sets are made in a uniform medium and are degraded by the same tidal process, effectively limits the potential effects of variation in detectability across the study area. |
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