BENGALURU: The eagerly-awaited tiger census, the line transect and sign survey, will kickstart in the state’s tiger reserves from January 15.The exercise that was pending for the last three months will be completed by February-end and submitted to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and Wildlife Institute of India (WII).
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change aims to release the all-India tiger assessment report on July 29, 2022, which is Tiger Day. “As the field exercise was delayed, the stress was on the most-important aspect of the assessment, the camera-trap method. It started in October and most parts of the reserves and sanctuaries have been covered.
Now, we will start the remaining part of the assessment — sign survey and transect-line assessment. We will start from January 15 and complete it by the month-end in tiger reserves and tiger-prevailing areas. In other forest patches, it will be completed by mid-February. No volunteers are being roped in this time,” a senior forest department official told The New Indian Express.
Tiger census: Covid scare haunts staffers
But the fear of Covid continues to haunt the department staff. Whether the census can be done in a staggered manner or at the earliest will depend on a crucial meeting on Covid restrictions between Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai and the expert committee on Tuesday.
“We have not prepared a calendar as planned earlier, but left it to the reserves and wildlife sanctuaries to take up the census based on the availability of staff,” the official added.
The census was earlier delayed because of the pandemic. When it was decided to be started, bugs were detected in the M-Stripe app during testing. NTCA has specified that a uniform app should be used across the country to upload details during the census.
“We found many technical issues and resolving them at the central level took long. We will use the app and also manually note down the details to ensure better efficiency. We cannot delay the exercise any further as computing takes time,” the official added.