Published: Less than 50 min ago
After being threatened with extinction, the situation has improved for Nepal’s striped carnivores. The country’s tiger population has almost tripled.
Deforestation and human encroachment on the tigers’ territory have led to sharp declines in tiger populations in Asia, but Nepal and 12 other countries signed a pledge in 2010 to double the population by this year.
Nepal is the only country that lives up to the promise. The number of tigers this year is 355, compared to 121 in 2009, according to the country’s authorities.
Conservationists monitored the population with thousands of motion-sensitive cameras in Nepal’s southern plains, where the predators roam. Experts then combed through thousands of images to identify individual animals by their unique stripes.
However, Nepal’s internationally acclaimed effort to increase the number of tigers has had a negative effect on some of the communities located near the animals’ range. At least 16 people have been killed in tiger attacks in the past year, according to Nepali government data.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than 100,000 tigers around the world, but the number dropped to a record low of 3,200 in 2010.