Nepal and India kicked off a historic joint tiger census on Tuesday, sending out experts to count the number of endangered Royal Bengal tigers living in their shared border region.
The area in question is thought to be home to some 500 tigers, making it one of the largest concentrated populations of the big cats in the world, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.
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The double survey is part of an ambitious tiger conservation project — Nepal promised the world it would double its Bengal population by 2022 in order to better protect the endangered species from poaching and loss of habitat. Step one is counting the present number of endangered animals in the zone.
This requires extensive technological cooperation between the two nations, as ecologist Maheshwar Dhakal of Nepal's National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Department explained to Reuters: "Simultaneous counting will help avoid the same tiger which crosses over from one side to the other from being counted twice as its motion will be captured by another camera on the other side."