India will adopt a system that will count elephants and tigers from December as a common survey.
Highlights:
The announcement was made on August 12 on the occasion of World Elephant Day.
The tiger survey will be held in four years, and elephants are surveyed once in five years.
Since 2006, the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, which is affiliated with the Environment Ministry, has had a standardised protocol used by States to estimate tiger numbers.
Tigers are counted based on sightings in camera traps and indirect estimation methods. Elephant numbers largely depend on States directly counting the elephants.
In recent years, techniques such as analysing dung samples have been deployed to estimate elephant birth rates and Population trends.
There were 2,997 tigers by the 2018-19 survey and 29,964 elephants by the 2017 survey in India.
Given that 90% of the area occupied by elephants and tigers is common, and after standardisation of estimation methods, having a common survey can significantly save costs.