News tips:

please read this interesting article by Aditya Joshi, Srinivas Vaidyanathan, Samrat Mondol, Advait Edgaonkar, Uma Ramakrishnan on Plosone

Connectivity of Tiger (Panthera tigris) Populations in the Human-Influenced Forest Mosaic of Central India

Today, most wild tigers live in small, isolated Protected Areas within human dominated landscapes in the Indian subcontinent. Future survival of tigers depends on increasing local population size, as well as maintaining connectivity between populations. While significant conservation effort has been invested in increasing tiger population size, few initiatives have focused on landscape-level connectivity and on understanding the effect different landscape elements have on maintaining connectivity.
We combined individual-based genetic and landscape ecology approaches to address this issue in six protected areas with varying tiger densities and separation in the Central Indian tiger landscape. We non-invasively sampled 55 tigers from different protected areas within this landscape. Maximum-likelihood and Bayesian genetic assignment tests indicate long-range tiger dispersal (on the order of 650 km) between protected areas.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077980