At the beginning of the 20th century, around 100,000 tigers lived in Asia. Hunting and habitat destruction subsequently caused their population to collapse dramatically to a few thousand animals. But for the first time in decades, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the NGO »Panthera« can report a substantial increase in the number of big cats: From 2015, the averaged population rose from 3200 to 4500 animals – an increase of around 40 percent.
Part of this increase goes back to the widespread use of automatic wildlife cameras, which are currently being used in remote regions to prove certain species. In addition, there were also increased protective measures that the tiger stock could recover through young people. Especially in India and Nepal, these efforts had an impact and caused intensified growth of the populations of the Bengal tigers domestic here.
The population of Siberian tigers in eastern Russia is also stable; along the border with China and in the northeast of the country, the subspecies also grows numerically. For other subspecies, however, the situation is worse, especially in Southeast Asia: Indo-Chinese, South Chinese and Malay tigers remain highly endangered and disappeared from various countries in the region. The same applies to the Sumatran tiger, whose habitat on the Indonesian island continues to shrink. Three subspecies are already extinct.
However, this classification is controversial: some experts assume that there are only two tiger subspecies: an island and a mainland subspecies, which in turn are divided into a northern and southern population. Despite the growth, the group of tiger countries has missed one goal: in 2010 they had agreed on the number of 6000 tigers by 2022.
