India’s 2018 Tiger Census sets Guinness World Records

India’s 2018 tiger census has made a world record of being the largest ever camera trap wildlife survey. The fourth edition of the census  was carried out between 2018-19.

Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Environment, Forest & Climate Change shared the news on Twitter.

Javadekar wrote: “Under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi, India fulfilled its resolve to double tiger numbers 4 years before the target through #SankalpSeSiddhi. The All India Tiger Estimation is now in the #GuinnessWorldRecord for being the largest camera-trap #wildlife survey, a great moment indeed & a shining example of #AatmanirbharBharat”

Camera traps (outdoor photographic devices fitted with motion sensors that start recording when an animal passes by) were placed in 26,838 locations across 141 different sites and surveyed an effective area of 121,337 square kilometres (46,848 square miles).

It is said that the camera traps captured 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife (76,651 of which were tigers and 51,777 were leopards; the remainder were other native fauna). From these photographs, 2,461 individual tigers (excluding cubs) were identified using stripe-pattern-recognition software