more-inBorders don’ faze these tigers: over a decade, at least 11 tigers moved from India into Nepal’ protected areas through the Terai, a landscape comprising agricultural areas and protected forest-grasslands in the Himalayan foothills. This reaffirms that tiger conservation requires not just protected areas but corridors too — especially across large landscapes — to ensure habitat connectivity and in turn, population growth. Habitat lossWith protected areas becoming isolated due to habitat loss and conversion, large mammals including tigers have to now traverse human-dominated areas to disperse to new territories. Identifying individual tigers, they found that at least 11 tigers used these corridors to re-colonise Nepal, thus aiding the recovery of tiger populations which had declined drastically in the mid 2000s due to severe poaching pressures. “Till the 1930s and 1940s, the now-fragmented protected areas were contiguous.

Source: The Hindu September 09, 2017 11:31 UTC