By Natalie Blachford | Project Leader
Tigers on the up, thanks to your support!
With the help of GlobalGiving donors, who fund Born Free’s tiger conservation work in the Satpuda forests of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in central India, there is fantastic news to report! On Global Tiger Day,back in July, India announced their tiger population had seen a significant increase, reaching 3,925 tigers. This represents an annual growth rate of 6% and is more than 2½ times the 1,411 tigers recorded when Born Free’s conservation work began there in 2004.
The study, conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India, analysed data gathered with the help of camera trap images. Results show that India is now home to almost 75% of the world’s wild tiger population. The largest population of 785 tigers is in Madhya Pradesh, followed by 563 in Karnataka, 560 in Uttarakhand and 444 in Maharashtra, with the remainder found in various other areas and reserves.
With your help, theSatpuda Landscape Tiger Partnership is devoted to protecting India’s tigers and Born Free recently spoke with one of the partners – Anish Andheria, President of the Wildlife Conservation Trust. “My days are almost 15 to 16 hours long, because I love what I do. I love to keep thinking about solutions, partnerships and working closely with my teams to develop strategies to solve conservation issues.
“We work with the state and central governments and try and translate our research work into action. I am a member of the National Tiger Conservation Authority. All of our work is designed in such a way that it can eventually be translated into larger change. I also look at reports, read other people's work, and coordinate with a lot of people within India and internationally, with the forest department, other organisations, other researchers, and so on.
Our tiger population estimation programme is the longest programme we have had.It's beenrunning eleven years now and we have been doing it largely in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. This has translated into several successes in securing large landscapes and several parks for wildlife. There were people on the ground who always knew these areas are important, but once we started conducting systematic studies, it added a lot of weight to what those people were saying.
“We have veryambitious plans. Our aim is to secure 30% of India for nature. We currently have 5.25% under the protected area network. India is doing a lot of things right for tigers. However, there are 18 tiger states,but tigers are only doing well in about six or seven of them. There are lots of success stories from the states doing well that other states can learn from.”
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
