It’s the Year of the Tiger, and a new population assessment offers some hope for the endangered species. An estimated 3,726 to 5,578 tigers currently live in the wild worldwide — up 40% from 2015, according to a new tiger assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). But much of the increase is because of improvements in monitoring the animals.
“A fairly significant chunk of that 40% increase is explained by the fact that we’re better at counting them, that many governments in particular have really sort of moved heaven and earth to do massive scale surveys,” Luke Hunter, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) big cat program, told NPR.The WCS is a nonprofit that has worked in roughly 60 countries across the world to save wildlife and wild places. Beside better counting methods, Hunter also attributes the higher tiger numbers to an increase in conservation efforts by governments in the countries where they live.
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