Documentary film shows tech boost for tiger count

National Geographic Channel presentation in the form of a television documentary called Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.
Scenes from Nat Geo’s documentary Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.
Scenes from Nat Geo’s documentary Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.

The roars are getting louder and stronger with the tiger population swelling from 2,226 in 2014 to 2,967 in 2019, according to an All India Tiger Estimation Report 2018. The harbingers of this encouraging news are all those unacknowledged forest workers and researchers who have bent over backwards to record, study and analyse tiger estimates across India. While the public is appraised with latest numbers now and then, this time they are being invited to view the journey, complete with its nuances. A National Geographic Channel presentation in the form of a television documentary called Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.

Scenes from Nat Geo’s documentary Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.
Scenes from Nat Geo’s documentary Counting Tigers follows the work undertaken for the latest Tiger census.

The study is conducted once every four years by the National Tiger Conservation Authority. “About 15,000 camera traps captured images of tigers and recorded their unique stripe pattern with the help of a dedicated software called M-STrIPES, or Monitoring System for Tigers,” says Dr YV Jhala, Scientist, WII, adding, “It records animals that pass by. From a total of 3.5 crore wildlife images,  about 76,000 were tigers. Skimming through all of them for individual identification would have taken years. Therefore, we used an image recognition software known as Extract Compare, which allows us to fingerprint tigers and compare tiger images from the existing database.” 

Tiger counting in the past was done via the old school approach of documenting pug marks, the authenticity of which was questionable. The one that Jhala and his team initiated, he says, involved use of advanced technology, making it fake proof. This was a two-phase sampling design, with Phase 1 involving 400,000sqkm of the forested landscape spread across 20 states in India sampled by forest guards.

“The guard walked about 15km in his beach, which is the size of about 15sqkm, and looked for all kinds of animals including tigers, leopards, sloth bear, elephants, rhino etc., and then made recordings on their mass, faecal matter, or dung. This was done through the M-STrIPES mobile app, which records GPS and plots the track the forest guard takes. Every time he finds a sign, he takes a photograph and it is geotagged. All India data is compiled on WII.”

This forms just one aspect of the census as not all tigers come in front of the camera traps. “For this, there are statistical models known as mockery capture estimates that help detects the population size that didn’t appear before us,” he says. From the difficulties faced to the victories delivered, these have been filmed in their rawness. If you are moved by what you see, perhaps it will mark the beginning of a long journey to save them. Counting Tigers airs on Hotstar.

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