A recent study finds that protecting corridors is critical to preserving genetic diversity in tigers, and minimizing extinction.
The study, published online on 30 December 2017 in the journal Biological Conservation, was undertaken by a team of researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning (FERAL), and the University of Montana.
The team used genetic information collected on field from tiger faecal samples, to understand how landscape features — like roads and agriculture — impact tiger movement in Central India, a global high priority tiger conservation landscape. Findings revealed that high traffic roads and densely populated urban areas are detrimental to tiger movement.
It is safe to assume that both, urban areas and road traffic, will increase rapidly in the future. To understand how tiger connectivity might be impacted by development, researchers simulated 86 different development scenarios. These included business-as-usual, constraints on landscape change and others with protected corridors delimited by the NTCA.
“Currently, there is movement of tigers and genetic exchange between protected areas. However, unplanned development, especially loss of forest cover around protected areas will have a strong negative impact on tiger connectivity in the future”, says Prachi Thatte, a PhD student in Dr Uma Ramakrishnan’s lab at NCBS, and lead author of the study. She adds, “Our results highlight the need for informed development plans that consider biodiversity and connected wildlife populations in addition to human development goals.”
Pro-active measures — such as notifying buffer areas, protecting corridors and maintaining populations between Protected Areas (PAs) — are critical to maintaining viable long-term tiger populations at a landscape scale.
Aditya Joshi, co-author, researcher at Wildlife Conservation Trust
India is a signatory to The Global Tiger Recovery Program, which aims to double the tiger numbers by 2020.
“Our results highlight that along with our efforts to increase tiger numbers within PAs, a lot more needs to be done to meet the targets we have set for the year 2020. To ensure both objectives are met, the need of the hour is to include conservation goals in regional developmental plans, a nationally important exercise which is seriously lacking,” says Srinivas Vaidyanathan, a researcher from FERAL, and co-author of the paper.
“We hope that such research will bridge gaps between science and policy in India” adds Dr Uma Ramakrishnan.
(Source: National Centre for Biological Sciences news release via EurekAlert!, 11.01.2018)
