Using Technology to Help Wild Cats and People Coexist

In Central India, F&ES doctoral student Jennie Miller is helping develop strategies to limit the increasingly frequent interactions between humans and wild cats that have triggered massive declines in populations of tigers and leopards.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller

For centuries, populations of tigers and leopards in central India have plummeted in the face of habitat degradation, the loss of prey, and a rise in sport hunting. Over the last few decades, however, it has been the increases in poaching and “retaliation killings” by livestock owners that have become the greatest threats facing these big cats.

 

Jennie Miller, a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, says the best strategy to stem these losses is to limit the interactions between these rare cats and livestock animals. And she’s developing strategies that use spatial technology to achieve this goal.

 

In an interview, Miller describes the relationship between wild cats and humans in this part of the world, how simple technologies can reduce conflicts, and the risks of working so close to these predators.

 

Can you describe the research you’re doing in India? 

In a nutshell, I’m creating geospatial tools to help people and big cats sustainably coexist. In many parts of Asia, people graze their livestock in landscapes shared with tigers and leopards. Big cats regularly kill domesticated livestock since they are easy prey, causing profound livelihood loses for livestock owners. For example, in the Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India where I work, more than 400 cattle, buffalo, goats, and pigs are killed each year. Though this is less than 0.5 percent of the 85,000 livestock in the area, even a small number of attacks can create a sense of insecurity and frustration for livestock owners. To reduce attacks, owners sometimes lace livestock carcasses with pesticides to poison the cats when they return to feed. Since only about 3,500 tigers remain in the wild, every cat counts for the survival of the species.

My research aims to help reduce this human-carnivore conflict by minimizing carnivore attacks on livestock. I’m building spatial models to understand where tigers and leopards are most likely to attack livestock. These models also generate “risk maps” to predict where future attacks may occur to assist the Forest Department and villagers when managing and grazing livestock. If livestock can be grazed in habitats where carnivores are less likely to attack — for example, away from dense forests where tigers hunt — then coexistence between people and tigers and leopards may be more feasible.

 

What are the threats facing these animals? And, for that matter, the people who live in these communities?

Over the past few centuries, habitat degradation, prey loss, and uncontrolled sport hunting have caused massive declines in tiger and leopard populations. However, in the past few decades, poaching and retaliation killing have emerged as the two greatest immediate threats for these big cats. Recent surges in the value of tiger and leopard body parts in international markets in southeast and east Asia — where they are sold for traditional medicine — are motivating a spree of illegal poaching, especially within India, which supports half the world’s wild tigers.

 

Retaliation killing — when villagers poison carnivores after losing livestock — also contributes to species declines, particularly since these incidences often kill young dispersing tigers and leopards as they move through agricultural fields to colonize or join other populations in nearby protected areas. And poaching and retaliation killing can be closely linked, since poachers may capitalize on a livestock owner’s desire to remove a troublesome tiger.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Jennie Miller interviews a forest guard

Attacks on humans are rare — far less frequent than deaths due to car accidents or even snake bites. Perhaps due to their rarity and primal essence, the media often sensationalizes these “man-eater” attacks, which can further instigate anger, fear, and retaliations from people. Nonetheless, attacks do occasionally happen. People who share forests with tigers and leopards are very aware of these risks and take precautions to avoid chances of attack, such as staying indoors at night, traveling in groups and regularly protecting small children. There is a great amount of respect — driven by a mixture of fear, appreciation and reverence — for large cats in India.

 

What does the mapping technology you’re using reveal? 

We’re at an exciting point in time where spatial technology like GPS units and satellite data are enabling the development of simple tools for management and conservation. One example is “spatial risk mapping,” which I use for my research. Basically, I recorded the GPS coordinates of hundreds of dead livestock in my study site as well as random sites to measure variation across the landscape. I combine these with information about the location of other environmental and human features, such as roads, villages, forests, and shrubs. I then build statistical models to predict the probability of a tiger or leopard attack on livestock across the landscape.

 

The end result is a map that can help visually identify where attacks might occur in the future. These maps can serve as powerful tools because they transcend language and education barriers by visually representing risk and so could be useful to help villagers in remote areas protect their livestock.

 

What have you learned so far?

Since tigers and leopards both use stalking hunting tactics to attack prey, I expected them to show similar hunting patterns. However, I found that tigers and leopards differ greatly in where they tend to kill livestock: Tigers attack most often in dense forests away from human infrastructure like roads and villages, whereas leopards kill in more open vegetation and aren’t as deterred by human presence. In fact, on several occasions, leopards boldly strolled into villages at night and killed livestock in bamboo enclosures adjacent to people’s mud huts while they slept inside!

“People generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks.”— Jennie Miller

I also expected livestock owners to have a strong sense of where both tigers and leopards kill. Yet when I interviewed owners and compared their perceptions about where these two cats tend to kill, I found that owners have a very accurate sense of where tigers attack but a poorer understanding of where leopards attack. I suspect this disparity occurs because tigers are constrained to hunting in dense forests but leopards can kill in a broader diversity of habitats, making it generally harder to predict where a leopard will attack. This means that people generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks, such as by strengthening night enclosures or hiring livestock herders. 

 

What do you hope will come out of your research?

These results provide valuable insights into how big cats, livestock, and people interact which I hope will help strengthen animal husbandry and livestock management to better protect livestock and reduce human-carnivore conflict. I’m working with the Forest Department of Kanha Tiger Reserve to integrate these spatial risk models into management to help guide their conservation efforts. For example, risk maps can be used to understand carnivore hunting behavior and patterns, especially the distinction between tigers and leopards, for developing strategies for protecting livestock. In considering the risk of an attack alongside other grazing considerations — such as browse quality and access from villages — livestock owners may also be able to make grazing decisions in a more informed way.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Miller inspects the remains of a cow killed by a wild cat.

What other skills have you had to develop to conduct this research? 

Learning Hindi has enabled me to more personally relate with villagers in India to understand the ramifications of livestock losses, as well as to understand the jokes made by my field assistants. Since I surveyed dead livestock and collected tiger and leopard scat for a year, I quickly developed a tolerance for bad smells, maggots, blood, and feces. I realized this a few months into fieldwork when I found myself elbow-deep in a bucket of water and tiger feces, separating the hair from particulate matter in order to identify prey contents. And to this day, I still reach for my GPS when I smell road kill. But more seriously, I also acquired a deep respect for the villagers and forest guards who literally risk their lives daily to live alongside tigers and leopards.

 

Have you ever felt unsafe doing this work, walking in places where these animals lurk?

Definitely! Though tigers and leopards rarely attack people, one or two people — usually solitary livestock herders or forest guards — are attacked in Kanha Tiger Reserve every year. These big cats don’t usually approach groups of people, so I always took a team of three to 10 people with me when surveying livestock carcasses. We also tried to avoid visiting fresh kills to reduce the chance that the cats would still be feeding when we approached. But sometimes this couldn’t be avoided and I can recall several cases when we knew a cat was lingering nearby.

 

Once, when my team and I were walking through a dense forest towards three cow carcasses killed the night before, the villagers in front of me said they could hear the tigress walking. When we reached the carcasses a few moments later, there was fresh blood on the carcass, indicating that she had been feeding a few minutes before we arrived. That day I truly began to understand the risks that villages take in living with these cats.

 

What made you want to focus your research in India? 

In January 2005 when I was a sophomore in college, I accompanied my father, a yoga and meditation teacher, on a visit to India to meet his guru. During our trip I saw first-hand the sudden tragedy of the tsunami in coastal Chennai and also heard stories while on safari about man-eating tigers in the dense jungles of Corbett Tiger Reserve. I was mesmerized by the people’s vibrancy and resiliency despite these unpredictable hardships, and greatly impressed by the extent to which Indians are economically and spiritually connected to nature. The trip helped inspire me to major in ecology and take classes in South Asian religion, art and language, and to later return to India as a Fulbright Scholar to study bird conservation in the western Himalayas. After a year of research in India I was hooked. I hope that I can continue working in India for the rest of my life.

Source: Yale University

For tiger populations, a new threat

This is an Amur tiger photographed by camera trap. Credit: WCS Russia Program

Along with the pressures of habitat loss, poaching and depletion of prey species, a new threat to tiger populations in the wild has surfaced in the form of disease, specifically, canine distemper virus (CDV). According to a new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and its partners, CDV has the potential to be a significant driver in pushing the animals toward extinction.

While CDV has recently been shown to lead to the deaths of individual tigers, its long-term impacts on tiger populations had never before been studied.

The authors evaluated these impacts on the Amur tiger population in Russia's Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik (SABZ), where tiger numbers declined from 38 individuals to 9 in the years 2007 to 2012. In 2009 and 2010, six adult tigers died or disappeared from the reserve, and CDV was confirmed in two dead tigers -- leading scientists to believe that CDV likely played a role in the overall decline of the population. Joint investigations of CDV have been an ongoing focus of WCS and Russian scientists at Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik and veterinarians at the regional Primorye Agricultural College since its first appearance in tigers in 2003.

A key finding of this study: Modeling shows that smaller populations of tigers were found to be more vulnerable to extinction by CDV. Populations consisting of 25 individuals were 1.65 times more likely to decline in the next 50 years when CDV was present. The results are profoundly disturbing for global wild tigers given that in most sites where wild tigers persist they are limited to populations of less than 25 adult breeding individuals.

The scientists used computer modeling to simulate the effects of CDV infection on isolated tiger populations of various sizes and through a series of transmission scenarios. These included tiger-to-tiger transmission and transmission through predation on CDV-infected domestic dogs and/or infected wild carnivores (such as foxes, raccoon dogs and badgers). High and low-risk scenarios for the model were created based on variation in the prevalence of CDV and the tigers' contact with sources of exposure.

Results showed that CDV infection increased the 50-year extinction probability of tigers in SABZ as much as 55.8 percent compared to CDV-free populations of equivalent size.

"Although we knew that individual tigers had died from CDV in the wild, we wanted to understand the risk the virus presents to whole populations," said WCS veterinarian Martin Gilbert. "Tigers are elusive, however, and studying the long-term impact of risk factors is very challenging. Our model, based on tiger ecology data collected over 20 years in SABZ, explored the different ways that tigers might be exposed to the virus and how these impact the extinction risk to tiger populations over the long term."

WCS Russia Program Director Dale Miquelle said, "Tigers face an array of threats throughout their range, from poaching to competition with humans for space and for food. 

Consequently, many tiger populations have become smaller and more fragmented, making them much more susceptible to diseases such as CDV. While we must continue to focus on the primary threats of poaching and habitat destruction, we now must also be prepared to deal with the appearance of such diseases in the future."

Priorities for future research, according to the authors, include identifying the domestic and wild carnivore species that contribute to the CDV reservoir, and those that are the most likely sources of infection for tigers. Tigers are too rare to sustain the virus in the long term, so CDV must rely on more abundant carnivore species to persist in the environment. 

Understanding the structure of the CDV reservoir will be a critical first step in identifying measures that might prevent or control future outbreaks. In addition, since we now know that small tiger populations are at greater risk to diseases such as CDV than larger populations, conservation strategies focusing on connectedness between populations become all the more important. "Estimating the potential impact of canine distemper virus on the Amur tiger population (Panthera tigris altaica) in Russia," appears in the current online edition of PloSONE. Authors include: Martin Gilbert of WCS and Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health at the University of Glasgow; Dale G. Miquelle of WCS; John M. Goodrich of Panthera; Richard Reeve, Sarah Cleaveland and Louise Matthews of Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health at the University of Glasgow; and Damien Joly of WCS and Metabiota.

This study was made possible through generous support from Morris Animal Foundation, Zoo Boise Conservation Fund, AZA Tiger Species Survival Plan Tiger Conservation Campaign, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

"Morris Animal Foundation is thankful to Dr. Miquelle and his team for helping protect the Amur Tigers," said Diane Brown, DVM, PhD, DACVP and Chief Scientific Officer for Morris Animal Foundation. "Our Foundation values their hard work and dedication to this study and we look forward to many more partnerships with the Wildlife Conservation Society."

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society

Camera trap images help wildlife managers ID problem tigers in India

Researchers with WCS and other partners in India are camera traps to ID individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people. Credit: WCS

Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners in India are using high-tech solutions to zero in on individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people.

In recent tiger-conflict cases involving both a human fatality and the predation of livestock, both occurring near two of India's national parks, WCS scientists helped to identify problem tigers using stripe pattern-matching software and additional information to make the connections. Both tigers have been captured and relocated to a nearby zoo.

Reducing human-wildlife conflict while promoting human welfare and conservation in important wildlife habitats is one of many topics under discussion of the World Parks Congress, a once-in-a-decade event focusing on the management and expansion of the world's protected area networks and the wildlife they contain. The congress, which took place in Sydney, Australia concluded today.

A new paper titled "Photographic Database Informs Management of Conflict Tigers" appears in the latest version of the journal Oryx. The authors are: Ullas Karanth, N. Samba Kumar, and Divya Vasudev of WCS's India Program.

"The vast majority of tigers generally avoid humans and focus only on natural prey species," said Dr. Ullas Karanth, WCS's Director for Science-Asia and lead author on the paper. 

"Using scientific methods to locate individuals involved in conflict with humans and livestock helps us to mitigate threats to people and prevent the capture of the wrong tigers, especially wherever tigers may venture beyond protected area borders."

While tigers struggle to survive in other landscapes across their range through Asia, the big cats in the Malenad Tiger Landscape of southwest India have thrived, becoming one of the largest tiger populations in the world with an estimated 400 animals.

Part of this conservation success has been due to a WCS research program focused on the identification of individual tigers. The system uses unique stripe patterns to identify and track individual animals, and software programs have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of the process. Since the initiation of the research protocol, more than 750 tigers have been identified from six protected areas in the Malanad Tiger Landscape in the Western Ghats across India. The system also enables researchers to keep track of other data such as home range locations, age and ex of individual animals, activity patterns. Over the longer term it even enables estimation of survival and recruitment rates and changes in numbers, all of which can be used to inform management decisions on wild tigers.

The tiger database has become a key factor in finding and capturing problem tigers. One of the recently captured animals was involved in the loss of human life near Bandipur National Park in late December of 2013. Scientists managed to get pictures of the animal from camera traps set up near the area of conflict and discovered a match with an animal photographed over a 5-year period and probably past its prime. Old tigers unable to catch natural prey animals can sometimes resort to hunting livestock, bringing them in conflict with people.

Another tiger, involved in the killing of cattle in a village next to Nagarahole National Park, was by contrast a 2-3 year old youngster some 35 kilometers from locations in which it was previously photographed. Scientists concluded this young tiger was likely searching for a territory, beyond protected areas.

Once ranging across Asia from Turkey to Indonesia, the tiger has been decimated by a combination of habitat destruction, overhunting of prey animal, poaching for the illegal trade and retaliatory killing by humans. The total wild population has been reduced in numbers from perhaps 100,000 at the turn of the 20th Century to a current estimate of fewer than 3,500 animals remaining in only 6 percent of the species' historic range.

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society