VIDARBHA TIGER CORRIDORS: TWO STATES ONE BRAND

Subject: Environment

Context: Study maps Vidarbha tiger corridors; movement far beyond guarded areas.

Concept:

In a first-of-its-kind project, radio telemetry has been deployed to identify corridors used by tigers in the Vidarbha landscape, tracking their actual movement — indicating that the animals are moving in a much wider swathe of area outside the protected areas than previously known.
Vidarbha has 331 tigers in a forest area of around 26,775 sq km, dissected by 84,202 km of roads, apart from irrigation canals and other projects. There have been growing instances of man-tiger conflict in the region.
The project, carried out between 2017 and 2020 using radio signals, identified 37,067 sq km, in all, of tiger corridors, further categorised into five classes as per frequency of tiger use — namely very low (10,289 sq km), low (18,727 sq km), medium (5,689 sq km), high (1,418 sq km) and very high (942 sq km).
Their report says that the tiger movement extends well beyond forested structural corridors modelled by earlier studies. The study shows extensive use of agricultural land by tigers adjoining small fragmented forests and rivers.