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A Wildlife Conservation Society Progress Report

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A Wildlife Conservation Society Progress Report A WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY PROGRESS REPORT BIG CATS Wildlife Conservation Society 2300 Southern Boulevard Bronx, NY 10460 wcs.org 2015 Wildlife Conservation Society Progress Reports provide you, our generous supporters, with updates and insights on core conservation activities. Together, we are securing a future for wildlife and wild places. WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature. WCS envisions a world where wildlife thrives in healthy lands and seas, valued by societies that embrace and benefit from the diversity and integrity of life on earth. Scientists Deploy Camera Traps to Protect Tigers Remote camera traps provide conservation scientists with valuable information that is difficult—and sometimes downright impossible—to gather by other methods. In Russia, India, and other tiger range countries, WCS teams are using this technology to monitor and protect wild tiger populations. Counting tigers has proven challenging as these forest of the Malenad Landscape in southwestern animals are elusive and often live in dense forest India to set up camera traps. Trekking up to 10 miles habitats, but monitoring is vital to successful per day through the tropical landscape, they walk conservation. We need to know how tiger numbers for months on end, setting up cameras at about today compare to past tiger numbers, how many 700 locations within nearly 2,300 square miles. tigers are born each year, where tigers are living, and how many tigers move in and out of landscapes. “Camera trapping has proven We also need to investigate factors that could be driving population changes, including threats such more accurate and reliable as a lack of prey and available forest cover due to in determining whether our deforestation, and human disturbance such as conservation action on the poaching. Compared to other methods for counting tigers including analyzing found footprints, camera ground is working.” trapping has proven more accurate and reliable in determining whether our conservation action on Animals will trigger a camera trap’s sensors when they the ground is working. pass within its range. Each year the traps capture over Every year for the past 20 years, wcs India 15,000 images of tigers, leopards, dholes, elephants, Director Ullas Karanth, with his team of researchers, deer, and other species that share this habitat. technicians, and community members, enters the These provide a record of the tigers’ stripes, which 2 Above: A camera trap in the Russian Far East captured this rare photo of an Amur tiger family. Tiger Stamp Back on Sale Congress has reauthorized the sale of the Save Vanishing Species postage stamp, also known as the Tiger Stamp. Once again, it is available for purchase at U.S. Post Offices. The tamps costs 60 cents—11 cents more than a regular first-class stamp. The additional 11 cents from each stamp’s sale go directly to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Multinational Species Conservation Funds, which support conservation programs to save tigers and other animals such as African and Asian elephants, great apes, rhinos, and turtles. Between September 2011 and December 2013 (when the stamp’s original authorization expired), the U.S. Postal Service sold more than 25 million stamps, raising more than $2.5 million for conservation at no taxpayer expense. Visit tigerstamp.com for more information or purchase stamps at shop.usps.com. 3 Below: A conservationist compares and counts tigers using camera are unique to each individual. Russia Director Dr. Dale Miquelle trap photographs. Scientists scan these photos using noted, “These photos provide a a pattern-matching software, small vignette of social interactions which reads each tiger’s stripes of Amur tigers, and an evocative like a barcode. This technology, snapshot of life in the wild for combined with innovative these magnificent animals.” statistical modeling, allows highly- Camera traps can also help trained technicians to count the resolve human-tiger conflicts— tigers photographed, so scientists key to successful long-term tiger can accurately estimate the total conservation. Though the vast population of tigers within a given majority of tigers avoid humans region. They have found that and focus solely on natural prey today, the Malenad Landscape is home to about 400 wild “Despite the sobering tigers—the world’s largest living population. threats to tigers, Aside from facilitating tiger camera traps tell counts, camera traps also provide us these animals unique and fascinating insights can thrive in into tiger ecology, behavior, and survival. In the Russian Far East, protected areas.” wcs and local partners captured photos of an entire family of species, conflict can occur when Amur tigers—an adult male, tigers cannot find natural prey and adult female, and three cubs— wander into human communities traveling together. The 21 images to prey on farmers’ livestock. In depict the family passing in front retaliation, some tigers are shot of the same camera trap within a to protect the livestock. On span of 2 minutes. These are the rare occasions, there are human first-ever photographs of such fatalities. To keep both tigers familial, fatherly behavior in an and people safe, wcs teams are adult male Amur tiger. As wcs now using camera traps to zero SCIENTISTS DEPLOY CAMERA TRAPS TO PROTECT TIGERS 4 1 2 3 4 in on individual “conflict tigers” and relocate them 1. Camera traps are readied for placement out of harm’s way. In two recent cases involving the in the field. predation of livestock and a human fatality, both 2. WCS India Director Ullas Karanth sets up a occurring near two of India’s national parks, wcs camera trap. scientists accurately identified the problem tigers, assisted in their capture, and helped relocate them to a 3. A tiger investigates one of WCS’s camera nearby zoological park. traps in India and provides a snapshot. Despite the sobering threats to tigers, camera traps tell us these animals can thrive in protected 4. Conservationists use a pattern-matching software areas. Our research has shown that over time, as to analyze tiger stripes and identify individuals. conservationists and governments have increasingly Documentation of the right and left flanks of one worked side by side to reduce threats and bolster individual tiger (page 2) helps scientists avoid protection for tigers, populations in many protected double counting. areas have slowly but surely recovered from a handful of tigers just decades ago to hundreds today. As wcs continues to advocate for and protect tiger populations across nine countries, we hope to see this trend continue so that majestic wild tigers can thrive. 5 SCIENTISTS DEPLOY CAMERA TRAPS TO PROTECT TIGERS Saharan Cheetahs Deemed One of World’s Rarest A new wcs study has officially identified the populations of other cheetah subspecies living in Critically Endangered Saharan cheetah as one Africa. The Saharan cheetah has adapted its behavior of the world’s rarest carnivores, with less than to cope with the harsh environment to which it is 250 individuals remaining in the wild. This research confined, avoiding humans and the heat by traveling provides the world’s first quantifiable data on the at night across the vast ground it covers to find prey. cheetah subspecies and produced some of the The new data also confirm that although Ahaggar world’s only photos of the subspecies. Published Cultural Park is still a relatively healthy habitat, in the scientific journalplos one in January 2015, the Saharan cheetah’s population density remains the study is the culmination of the research of wcs dangerously low. conservationist Dr. Sarah Durant and scientists from As the plos one study points out, the Asiatic the Zoological Society of London. cheetah (a different subspecies) has been a successful The aharanS cheetah is highly elusive. Until flagship species for Iran, where it has helped focus now, researchers had to rely solely on anecdotes and national pride and attract international conservation guesswork to understand the subspecies’ behavior resources. In Botswana, cheetahs are a driver of and needs. For this recent study, researchers set up ecotourism and related economic expansion. This infrared camera traps in Algeria’s Ahaggar Cultural study on Saharan cheetahs could attract similar Park to closely observe the animal’s ecology and attention to the often overlooked Ahaggar region, behavior throughout its native habitat, which which would catalyze efforts to gather the resources features extreme desert conditions. The report and attention needed for improved conservation to reveals that Saharan cheetah populations are more protect these desert-dwelling big cats. nocturnal, more wide-ranging, and less dense than 6 WCS Saves Snow Leopards in Critical Landscapes The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies snow leopards as Endangered, with less than 7,000 remaining in the wild. Their current range is limited to the remote mountains of Central Asia and parts of China, Mongolia, Russia, India, and Bhutan. WCS has a long history of snow leopard conservation, beginning with former WCS Chief Scientist George Schaller's surveys on snow leopards and their prey in the Himalayas in the 1970s. We now work in a number of snow leopard range countries, focusing on populations with ample potential to bounce back, to help this endangered species thrive in the wild once more. Afghanistan wcs’s eight years of snow leopard conservation in reported any incidents of snow leopards killing livestock Afghanistan culminated in 2014 with the declaration corralled in these structures or subsequent retaliatory of the remote northwestern district of Wakhan as the killing of the snow leopards. We hope the structures country’s second protected area—Wakhan National will continue to reduce this primary cause of conflict Park. This vast area of 4,241 square miles—25 percent between snow leopards and their human neighbors.
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