Study

Bringing the tiger back from the brink—the six percent solution

Walston, J.; Robinson, J. G.; Bennett, E. L.; Breitenmoser, U.; da Fonseca, G. A. B.; Goodrich, J.; Gumal, M.; Hunter, L.; Johnson, A.; Karanth, K. U.; Leader-Williams, N.; MacKinnon, K.; Miquelle, D.; Pattanavibool, A.; Poole, C.; Rabinowitz, A.; Smith, J. L. D.; Stokes, E. J.; Stuart, S. N.; Vongkhamheng, C.; Wibisono, H.

PLoS Biology, 2010

Peer-reviewedcomparative studymixed

What they did

Sites across the tiger range were assessed for whether they currently hold breeding tigers at meaningful density, and the proportion of the world population concentrated in them calculated.

Studied in: Panthera tigris
Sample size: 42 source sites assessed across the tiger range

What they found

Almost the entire remaining wild tiger population breeds in a small number of sites making up a few per cent of the species’ remaining range. Effort spread evenly across the range therefore misses where the animals actually are.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Securing a small set of identified source sites is the immediate priority for preventing extinction, whatever longer-term landscape strategies are also pursued.

How NatureHQ reads it

Included because it changes what the reader should picture. The wild tiger population is not spread thinly across Asia; it is a set of small, specific, well-known places, most of them with names. That is a bleaker fact than a range map suggests and a more actionable one.

Limitations

A prioritisation argument, and a contested one — other authors argue it underweights connectivity and recovery outside source sites.
Site assessments rest on data of uneven quality across countries.
Now over a decade old; several populations have changed materially since.