Freeland has been hard at work running a training course in the run-up to starting the second tiger monitoring survey in Khao Laem National Park (KLNP) in which 80 cameras will be installed in the park.
Thailand is one of the last strongholds for the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti). The Western Forest Complex (WEFCOM) supports the largest single population of tigers remaining in mainland Southeast Asia. WEFCOM’s Khao Laem has until recently been largely overlooked, but evidence now confirms that it is critical as a connecting wildlife corridor and supports a resident tiger population.
Understanding Khao Laem’s current tiger population and degree of connectivity with other tiger populations within Western Thailand is an important step toward informing and facilitating landscape-scale recovery and so a rigorously scientific Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture (SECR) grid survey, is being carried out by Freeland and the KLNP authority.
Results of this tiger monitoring survey will be presented to WildCats in 2021.