Nearly 15,000 miles of new Asian roads will be built in tiger habitat by mid-century, deepening the big cat’s extinction risk and highlighting the need for bold new conservation measures now, according to a new study.
Nearly 15,000 miles of new Asian roads will be built in tiger habitat by mid-century, deepening the big cat’s extinction risk and highlighting the need for bold new conservation measures now, according to a new study.
University of Michigan conservation ecologist Neil Carter and his colleagues used a recently developed global roads dataset to calculate the extent and potential impacts of existing and planned road networks across the nearly 450,000-square-mile, 13-country range of the globally endangered tiger.
Fewer than 4,000 tigers remain in the wild. They are found mainly in South Asia and Southeast Asia, regions that will experience accelerating pressure from human development in coming years.
Road construction often exacerbates all three of the main threats to tigers: prey depletion, habitat degradation and poaching.
Read more at University of Michigan
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