The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) under the Environment Ministry has challenged the claims of a recent study led by Oxford University which found the Government’s methodology for its latest tiger census flawed. NTCA in its clarification stated that the study was a “theoretical iteration” on old data whose precision is “questionable”.
The NTCA, has recently published its tiger census report estimating the presence of 2,226 tigers in the country. The clarification stated that the issues that a team of Indian wildlife scientists had raised has “no relevance to the 2014 tiger population and status estimation”.
A team of scientists from University of Oxford, Indian Statistical Institute and Wildlife Conservation Society led by tiger conservation expert Ullas Karanth and Gopalaswamy recently in their study claimed to have exposed inherent shortcomings in the ‘index-calibration’ method which meant it could produce inaccurate results.
“There is a remedy for poor data analysis but there is no remedy for poorly collected data; any insights that emerge from these is also likely to be seriously flawed and may mislead even well meaning scientists. We believe such is the case with the current paper by Karanth and his associates.
NTCA said the study is based on data of 2005 and 2011 and has deliberately ignored methods used in recent estimation which are currently most advanced and robust spatial models and address all concerns raised in recent publication in ‘Methods in Ecology and Evolution’. The paper and media reports are contradicting themselves by not disputing the increase in tiger numbers in the first place, while questioning the methodology.
“The reports are wrongly quoting an increase of tiger numbers by 49 per cent from 2006 to 2010 wherein the growth was 17 per cent,” NTCA pointed out NTCA. It further added the contention of the study of having a high detection probability being unrealistic is also “flawed” as an area of more than 3 lakh square kilometers was intensively sampled using 9,735 cameras which yielded such a high number of individual tigers.