(NewsNation) — Scientists are using NASA satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine’s computing power to develop a real-time monitoring system for tiger habitats.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, wild tiger numbers have been in decline for about a century. While numbers are starting to “tick upward,” the WWF notes that only about 5,575 tigers still remain in the world, and that “much more work is needed to protect this species.”
Now, though, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says there’s been a “breakthrough,” with TCL 3.0, a program that blends space technology and “on-the-ground data gathering” to monitor the tigers.
“This is a way to look at both the big picture and see changes on the ground as they’re happening,” Eric W. Sanderson, Vice President for Urban Conservation at the New York Botanical Garden, and first author of a study on Tiger Conservation published in December, said in a statement. “The ultimate goal is to monitor changes in real-time to help stabilize tiger populations across the range.”
TCL 3.0 looks specifically at tigers whose ancestors first appeared in Eurasia 62 million years ago. These tigers have historically been found from the Caspian Sea to the Russian Far East, and south to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java, and Bali.
The total area of TCLs, or Tiger Conservation Landscapes, declined from 1.025 million to about 912,000 square kilometers between 2001 and 2020. That represents a range-wide loss of 11%, with the greatest losses seen in southeast Asia and southern China.
About 63 TCLs are spread across 10 countries. India is home to about 3,000 of the world’s remaining tigers in 35 landscapes.
India, Nepal, Bhutan, northern China and southeastern Russia have all seen expansions of tiger habitats, showing there’s potential for expanding tiger ranges into restoration landscapes.
“If these habitats had sufficient prey and tigers were sustainably introduced, the area occupied by tigers could increase by 50%, the researchers found,” a news release from the USDA said.
A primary cause of engagement for “Panthera Tigris,” which is the largest cat on Earth, is habitat loss, the USDA wrote.
Authors of the December wrote that to combat this, it is important to know where and when habitat loss is happening.
Despite this, until now, there was no way to measure and monitor changes in the status of tigers and their habitat, or continually update the data.
But now, Laura Rogers, the associated program manager for NASA’s Ecological Conservation Program, said Earth observations such as VIIRS, MODIS and Landsat products “holistically see the impact of human activity” on critical habitats, so that they can then change their management approaches.
The analytical systems provide information for countries to help them maintain their tiger populations such as priority landscapes needing protection, and changes in the extent and quality of the habitat. This gives an “early warning system” for encroachment or habitat degradation.
TCL 3.0 also analyzes the “human footprint,” or an index of people’s impact on a landscape. This all provides scientists with a “real-time assessment” of what is happening to forested ecosystems in Asia.
“The system-wide view provided by TCL 3.0 is a game-changing innovation that will enable tigers as a species to thrive,” Rogers said.
