More than 4,000 personnel from Forest Department and NGOs take up the exercise

A little more than 4,000 personnel drawn from the Forest Department and from voluntary agencies took part in an exercise to assess and document the natural habitat in the wildlife sanctuaries and national parks of Telangana State.

The exercise has been taken up and completed in the nine sanctuaries that include two tiger reserves and three national parks spread across the State. “We carried out the task between April 24 and 30 in the 12 protected areas and their detailed field reports are now awaited,” said A. Sankaran, Deputy Conservator of Forests-Wildlife (retired).

The exercise to enumerate the herbivore and carnivore numbers was carried out using the national methodology of trail and transect instead of the usual pug mark practice deployed in the State.

Trail was used for assessing the carnivore numbers, while transect, a method of taking a fixed straight path and recording occurrences of species along it, had been put to use for enumerating the herbivores.

This being first such exercise in the new State of Telangana, a fair assessment of the animal presence is expected to be arrived through it. Personnel involved in the estimation exercise also tabulated information related to flora available and issues such as grass-cutting, biotic pressure and timber felling in these areas.

“This is going to be a total estimate of prey, predator, habitat and also human disturbances in the protected areas,” he explained.

Detailed formats were used by the enumerators and for processing and analysing them, the Forest Department had planned seeking the services of the World Wide Fund (WWF).

“They have the software required and we will request the WWF to send their scientists to analyse the data or else send the data to them along with our officials,” added Mr. Sankaran.