Browsing by Author "Jhala, Y V"

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    Status of Tigers
    (Wildlife Institute of India, 2022) Qureshi, Qamar; Jhala, Y V; Yadav, S P
    In 1973, the Project Tiger was established with the objective of utilizing the tiger’s functional role and charisma to garner public support and resources for preserving representative ecosystems. Since its inception, the project has expanded from nine tiger reserves covering 18,278 km2 to 53 reserves covering 75,796 km2, which account for 2.3% of India’s land area. Despite this, most tiger reserves and protected areas in India are existing as small islands in a vast sea of ecologically unsustainable land use, and many tiger populations are confined to small protected areas. Although some habitat corridors exist that allow tiger movement between them, most of these habitats are not protected areas, continue to deteriorate further due to unsustainable human use and developmental projects, and thereby are not conducive to animal movement. As tigers inhabit diverse habitats across a vast geographical expanse in India, we have categorized the tiger-bearing habitats into five major landscapes based on biogeography and interconnectivity of the habitats: 1) Shivalik-Gangetic plains, 2) Central India and Eastern Ghats, 3) Western Ghats, 4) North Eastern Hills and Brahmaputra Flood Plains, and 5) the Sundarbans. Each landscape is analyzed as a separate unit, since environmental and habitat covariates differ in their relationship with tiger abundance in each of the landscapes. Additionally, landscapes are an ecologically holistic entity because they function as a biological unit wherein tiger populations can share common individuals, a common gene pool, and can potentially disperse between populations. Given the current focus of landscape scale management philosophy currently being adapted, and that tiger movement between landscapes is rare in modern times, this division makes ecological sense, especially for management inferences and implementation.