[CAT] "Protecting Tigers’ Final Strongholds"

[rfmcdonald]

Panthera tigris altaica and cub, at Buffalo Zoo
Originally taken by Dave Pape

The image of a Siberian tiger and one of her cubs at left, taken a couple of years ago by Wikimedia Commons contributor Dave Pape, was taken in the Buffalo Zoo, in New York State. For the various tiger populations of Asia, zoos and other such parks are almost safer for them than their natural habitat, where they suffer directly from hunting and indirectly from habitat destruction. Over at Wired Science, Jess McNally writes that key to the survival of Asian tigers is the maintenance of safe home territories, connected somehow to allow for sufficiently large and genetically diverse tiger populations.

“A lot of effort has been focused on distributing efforts across a broad range, but we need to make sure that these source sites are absolutely protected from poaching, rather than spreading resources too thin,” said Wildlife Conservation Society Asia director Joe Walston, lead author of the study in PLoS Biology September 14.

The researchers identified 42 key tiger habitats through interviews with about 300 people working on tiger conservation on the ground, as well as by analyzing the published material on tiger populations, Walston said.

“If we don’t do what’s in this paper than we have nothing. But we have to do much more than that,” said World Wildlife Fund scientist Eric Dinerstein, who has done work on tigers but was not involved in this study.

“There is no reserve today that is big enough to maintain a genetically viable population of tigers,” he said. “We either need whopping big preserves, which is nearly impossible, or we need to manage tigers as a metapopulation — one big population that is linked by dispersal and habitat corridors.”

Maintaining continuous habitat corridors of forest is critical for keeping tiger populations interacting, since tigers rarely cross even a one or two mile forest gap, Dinerstein said. He added that the World Bank estimates 500 billion dollars per year will be spent building new infrastructure and roads in the tiger range over the next ten years. If governments wait to protect connecting forest corridors, they’ll soon be gone.