Joint-nation tiger census begins
Officials in India and Nepal are beginning their first ever joint census to find an exact number of Royal bengal tigers living in the Terai Arc region, which spreads across the two countries.
The survey is set to take place in more than 12 wildlife reserves and forests in the 950 kilometre (600 mile) region that covers the Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and into southern Nepal.
According the the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), who is involved in the study, Terai Arc is home to one of the world's most dense tiger populations, with a current estimate of 500.
Led by the governments of both India and Nepal, the census will involve installing hundreds of camera traps that will allow forest and nature protection officials to identify each tiger.
The survey is also hoped to highlight the availability of prey, which will further assist with future conservation.
Megh Bahadur Pandey, the director general at Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, explained that the use remote motion-sensitive cameras means no tiger will be counted twice.
"The same tiger trapped by a camera here on the Nepali side could cross over into India, but that tiger will be trapped by another camera there," he said.
India and Nepal's census comes as part of a large conservation strategy unveiled in 2010, which proposes to double the wild tiger population by 2022.
