The Chitwan National Park (CNP) has begun a study about the carrying capacity of rare Royal Bengal tiger. The CNP felt the necessity to carry out study about this wildlife's carrying capacity following a decrease in its population in the recent finding.
According to ecologist Laxman Poudel of Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, the study team includes international experts--Dr Rajan Amin from the Zoological Society of London and India's wildlife expert Abhishek Narayan-- and the study is the first of its kind in terms of the participation of internal experts.
Methods applied by various countries in the world have been adopted for the study. Others members in the team are Department's deputy director general Gopal Prasad Bhattarai and ecologist Poudel, Kanchan Thapa of the World Wildlife Fund, Dr Naresh Subedi of National Trust for Nature Conservation, another expert Dr Bhagwan Raj Dahal and under secretaries at the Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation.
The study is field-based and data plays a more role in it. The report unveiled last month shows that in the past five years the number of Royal Bengal in the CNP decreased by 27. The team plans to complete the study within the current fiscal. No study has been conducted so far to find out the carrying capacity of any species of wildlife in the CNP that spreads in an area measuring around 953 square kilometers. Its buffer zone covers an area of around 729 square kilometers.
It may be noted that the 2013 data puts the number of big cats in the CNP at 120 while this figure was found to be declined to 93 this year, drawing concerns from various quarters mainly of people and organizations working for wildlife conservation.
