Online video teaches you to track tigers

BANGALORE: If you are concerned about the declining numbers of the majestic cats and their prey, you can get trained to do a survey on your own, thanks to state experts.
The tiger population, a subject of great debate and concern, can be tracked through various advanced methods. The Wildlife Conservation Society - India Program (WCS - India) released a training video on YouTube, a popular video-sharing network on the internet.Called `Monitoring tigers and their Prey - The Right Way', it's aimed at wildlife researchers, park managers, conservation volunteers and students.
The 5-part video, produced by wildlife filmmaker Shekar Dattatri with tiger scientist K Ullas Karanth, is the first of its kind and showcases the latest scientific methods to estimate tiger and prey population and measuring habitat occupancy.
The video is based on the print manual `Monitoring Tigers and their Prey' edited by Karanth and James D Nichols. It focuses on three methods -- camera trapping, occupancy surveys (creating an index of presence or absence of certain animal species based on counting of pug marks and others), line transect sampling (walking on pre-determined lines) and counting of tiger prey like cheetal, sambar and others.
"A robust scientific system will allow us to accurately measure population trends of tigers and their prey from year to year. Such a monitoring system could help us prevent local extinctions like the one in Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan a few years ago," says Karanth. Till now, the Indian government relied on the scientifically flawed pugmark method, in which there was scope for inflating tiger numbers. The government has discarded this method in favour of scientific techniques such as those outlined in the video, Karanth added.
The video will also be useful to people studying other big cats like jaguars, cheetahs, snow leopards and leopards because the monitoring methods are almost the same.
The video can be accessed at www.youtube.com/monitoringtigers