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    Seeking more accuracy: Fourth all-India Tiger census goes digital

    Synopsis

    Experts at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) said "all out" efforts would be made to count the number of tigers in the Northeast.

    Tiger-bccl
    The tiger count according to the 2006 census was 1,411 and 1,706 in 2010, according to NTCA officials.
    NEW DELHI: India has begun its fourth exercise to estimate the number of tigers across the country, with a complete digitisation of the process to make it more accurate.

    The assessment will be based on an Android phone based application and desktop version of M-STrIPES for collecting, archiving and analysing data. M-STrIPES stands for monitoring system for tigers-intensive protection and ecological status.

    So far, this exercise, conducted every four years to estimate tiger numbers in India, has involved two phases. The first phase included sending forest guards and officials in 18 states to collect raw data on the basis of pug marks and scat.

    This raw data was classified as the first sample collection. The second sample was collected by biologists after installing camera traps. After this, both the samples were correlated using a customised software that used stripes of tigers to identify individual tigers.

    Under the new system, the double sampling technique remains the same but a phone based application has been added. This app automatically records the track log of surveys and routes taken by forest officials in collecting the first sample and then of biologists in the second sample. It automatically records data on animal sightings with geotagged photographs.

    This is expected to make the world’s largest wildlife survey effort more accurate in terms of coverage, intensity of sampling and quantum of camera trapping. Wildlife Institute of India scientist YV Jhala said, “We will be able to improve the accuracy of the exercise with this digitisation. A new area that would be covered would be Northeast. So far, in the previous three surveys, it has been poorly sampled.”


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