In perhaps what might be considered cautiously optimistic news, forests in critical parts of the world haven’t been destroyed as much as anticipated, meaning enough of them remain to achieve an international goal of doubling world tiger populations.
Fewer than 3,500 tigers are left in the wild, making them the most endangered big cat of all. Much of this is because only 7 percent of the tiger’s territory remains in Asia. In the last century alone, wild tiger numbers have plunged by 95 percent.
What’s killing the tigers?
The big problems are the usual culprits: habitat destruction (from logging, development, and agriculture) and poaching (partially because certain tiger body parts are used in traditional Asian medicine).
By 2010, the crisis had grown to the point that government officials from the 13 Asian countries where tigers still roam, including four heads of state, convened a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. There, they agreed on a global recovery goal: By 2022, the wild tiger population would be double what it was at the time—a motion known as the Tx2 goal.
And so far, there have been some exciting successes towards achieving it. Nepal reports its tiger population has increased by 61 percent, while India reports a 31 percent growth. At the same time, though, habitat loss has only continued to eat away at the remaining areas where tigers can live. This caused some to become concerned that the Tx2 goal would be impossible to achieve—because too little habitat would be left to support a wild tiger population of that size.
How much space is left?
And so, Anup Joshi of the University of Minnesota in St Paul led a study that attempted to determine just how much area was left for tigers, according to a paper in Science Advances. Using Google Earth Engine’s cloud computing platform, the team processed enormous amounts of satellite imagery data from 2001 to 2014 from Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring system that aims to provide information to empower people across the globe to manage and conserve forests.
With this technology, they were able to estimate changes in forests to the level of about 100 feet (30 meters) in some areas. According to Joshi, this is a huge change from before, as access to this kind of technology was extremely limited.
And the results are surprisingly promising. The forest loss in the areas of concern was 7.7 percent—much less than had been estimated, especially considering that the 13 tiger range countries have some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
“Most encouraging was that loss was less than expected in the 51 tiger reserves,” wrote the authors in the paper. “This suggests that if future habitat loss is prevented, the tiger recovery in some range states will accelerate. In these promising locales of enhanced protection, a doubling of the tiger population could be attainable by 2022.”
However, of the 7.7 percent of forest destruction, 98 percent was lost in 10 of the areas considered most critical for doubling the tiger population. The greatest losses were in Malaysia and Sumatra, where palm oil business is booming. Palm oil is the world’s most popular vegetable oil, and shows up everywhere from shampoo to Nutella. Plantations for the plants have resulted in massive forest loss in these regions, which is not only a danger to tigers, but to Sumatran and Bornean orangutans and Sumatran and pygmy elephants.
The impact in these 10 regions are naturally being described as “devastating”.
“There are three important things for the conservation of tigers,” said Joshi. “Habitat, anti-poaching efforts and maintaining tiger prey species. We want this study to encourage people to think that doubling numbers is possible but we don’t want to paint too rosy a picture.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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