Foresters to Enumerate Wildlife in AP from December 1

Vijayawada: Foresters, armed with M-STrIPES (Monitoring System for Tigers’ Intensive Protection and Ecological Status) app on their mobile phones, will scout the forests in Andhra Pradesh, including the Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve, to enumerate carnivores, herbivores and even certain species of vegetation, beginning from December 1 to December 8 as part of phase-1 of the All India Tiger Estimation exercise for the year 2025–26.

Foresters will divide themselves in teams and walk their specific line transacts corresponding to the assigned latitude and longitude specified.

Under Format 1, they will capture the signs of carnivores, mainly tigers, leopards, wild dogs and others. Using the M-STrIPES app on their mobile phones, they will look for pug marks and scratch marks on the ground when they urinate or pass faecal matter. The teams will record marks on the soft bark of the trees, where carnivores, mainly tigers, clean their claws after eating their kill.

Under Format 2, signs of herbivores, including deer of various species like the smallest mouse deer, antelopes and other animals, such as pellets; scratch marks, shredding, and hair-like indirect evidence of the herbivores, will be captured.

Under Formats 3 to 5, in each line transact spread over two to five km, two to three foresters will find out top five dominant trees, five shrubs or bushes, and grasses over 15-metre radius, to keep track of their growth till the next tiger estimation is carried out after four years.

Data captured under all these formats will be accumulated and analysed centrally.

Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve field director B. Vijay Kumar said, “As part of All India Tiger Estimation, we will take up a comprehensive study on predators, co-predators and herbivores, apart from vegetation status, as a sampling in the NSTR spread over in 5,950 square kilometres. We will check the trend of tiger population, whether it is going up or down in the area, food availability, human disturbance or any unwanted weed growth, so that we can take up intervention measures and correct the imbalance.”

At present, NSTR has 87 tigers. Foresters will give a unique code to each tiger, so that if they move from AP to Telangana or vice versa, they can keep a track of them by inquiring with their counterparts in the other state. This will help them come up with the count of tiger population based on scientific evidence.

Ahead of the enumeration, Forest authorities are hopeful of a considerable rise in the tiger population in AP in the upcoming All India Tiger Estimation.

Divisional forest officers have been given the task of training teams on how to capture data on the software application installed on the mobile phones.