Tigers - Population & Distribution

An increasingly restricted feline

Previous Population and Distribution
Less than a hundred years ago, tigers prowled in the forests of eastern Turkey and the Caspian region of Western Asia. They were found in the Indian sub-continent, stretching to Indochina through China, Myanmar and Thailand.

Branching out south, tigers inhabited lowland rainforests of Malaysia and the Indonesian islands of Bali, Java and Sumatra. They were also found in the Koreas, extending up to the Russian Far East. By the 1980s, tigers on Bali and Java, and those in the Caspian region were extinct.

Current Population and Distribution
The tiger's former range has contracted and fragmented dramatically in recent decades.

Tigers now occur only in scattered populations in parts of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Sumatra, and the Russian Far East, with a small number still surviving in China and possibly a few in North Korea.

Although there are no recent and accurate estimates of the world tiger population, numbers are thought to have fallen by about 95 per cent since the turn of the twentieth century, down from perhaps 100,000 to the present estimate of around 4,000.

The South China tiger is on the verge of extinction, and the Chinese population of the Amur (Siberian) tiger is in a critical state, although 431-529 individuals are estimated to survive in the neighbouring Russian Far East.