After eight months of the most intensive wildlife survey ever conducted in Telangana, the sixth All India Tiger Estimation has documented 42 individual tigers in Amrabad Tiger Reserve — a fourfold recovery from a near-depleted founding population a decade ago. Neo Science Hub reports on the science, the methodology, the technology, and the ecological challenges that lie beneath that milestone number.
When the Telangana Forest Department and the Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society announced the preliminary results of the All India Tiger Estimation 2026 for Amrabad Tiger Reserve, the headline figure — 42 individually identified tigers — was widely reported as a conservation milestone. It is one. But for readers of Neo Science Hub, the number is the beginning of the story, not its end. Behind the figure lies eight months of camera-trap deployment across 2,611 square kilometres of rugged Nallamala terrain, a grid design of 2,240 cameras at 1,120 paired locations, a methodology evolved over six census cycles, and an ecological recovery story that is simultaneously inspiring and, in ways that demand careful scientific attention, incomplete.This article examines the Amrabad AITE 2026 exercise in full — its design, its execution, its preliminary findings, and the conservation science questions those findings raise.
Amrabad Tiger Reserve occupies 2,611 square kilometres of the Nallamala Hills in Nagarkurnool and Nalgonda districts of Telangana — a landscape of dry deciduous forest, deep gorges, rocky plateaus, and perennial streams that drain into the Krishna River system. It was constituted as a standalone tiger reserve in 2014, carved out of the erstwhile Rajiv Gandhi Tiger Reserve following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and sits as the Telangana component of what was previously the Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve — the largest tiger reserve in India, whose Andhra Pradesh section (3,728 sq km) remains adjacent to Amrabad’s southern boundary.
Together, Amrabad and Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam form a contiguous forest block of over 6,300 square kilometres in the heart of the Deccan Plateau — the largest contiguous tiger habitat in peninsular India. The landscape acts as an ecological bridge between central India’s tiger populations and southern India’s Western Ghats reserves, supporting gene flow between populations that would otherwise be genetically isolated. Its plateau terrain supports tiger and leopard as apex predators, alongside a prey community of sambar, chital, barking deer, four-horned antelope, nilgai, and wild pig, with sloth bear, wild dog, and jackal as co-predators, and a rich avifauna that includes several Eastern Ghats endemics.
It is a landscape of significant ecological complexity — and of significant ecological challenge. The NTCA’s own report, ‘Status of Ungulates in Tiger Habitats of India,’ classified the Amrabad-NSTR-GundlaBrahmeswaram belt as an ‘isolated block with a rapidly increasing tiger population but low prey density,’ adding a warning that resonates throughout the conservation science of this landscape: ‘Without prey recovery and supplementation, human-wildlife conflict in this region is also expected to rise rapidly.’ That scientific assessment, issued by the national authority, frames the significance of AITE 2026’s Amrabad results — 42 tigers in a landscape where prey density is acknowledged to be insufficient — more precisely than a celebration of numbers alone.
NTCA’s own assessment characterised the Amrabad-NSTR landscape as ‘an isolated block with a rapidly increasing tiger population but low prey density.’ That scientific warning sits directly beneath the headline count of 42 — and makes the recovery story simultaneously inspiring and ecologically urgent.
8 Months, 2,240 Cameras, 2,611 Sq KM
The AITE 2026 exercise in Amrabad ran from November 2025 to June 2026 — an eight-month operational window designed to capture animal movement across dry season, early monsoon, and monsoon onset conditions. This multi-season coverage is ecologically significant: tiger and prey movement in the Nallamala landscape is strongly influenced by seasonal water availability, with animals concentrating around perennial sources during summer and dispersing more widely when monsoon rains create temporary water points across the plateau.
The survey’s spatial architecture was built on a 2 square kilometre grid system dividing the entire 2,611 square kilometre reserve area. At each grid centroid or the nearest ecologically appropriate point, a paired camera station was established — two motion-sensitive cameras positioned to photograph both left and right flanks of passing animals simultaneously. This bilateral flank photography is essential for individual tiger identification: each tiger’s stripe pattern is unique, equivalent to a fingerprint, but the pattern on the left flank differs from that on the right. Bilateral capture allows the identification software to match individuals photographed from different directions and different stations, preventing both under-counting from missed identifications and over-counting from double-identification of the same animal.
A total of 2,240 camera traps were deployed at 1,120 paired stations across these grids — one of the largest single-reserve camera deployments in the history of Indian wildlife monitoring. The reserve was operationally divided into four blocks, with camera traps in each block active for approximately 30 continuous days before being retrieved and moved to the next block. This rolling deployment approach allowed a team of finite size to cover the entire reserve systematically while maintaining the minimum 25-day camera activity window at each station that statistical capture-recapture methodology requires for robust population estimation.
The institutional leadership of the exercise reflects both its scale and the strength of the Telangana forest department’s commitment to scientific monitoring. Overall supervision was provided by Dr. Sunil S. Hiremath, IFS, Field Director, Amrabad Tiger Reserve, and Sri Revanth Chandra, IFS, District Forest Officer, Nagarkurnool. Forest Divisional Officers, Range Officers, frontline field staff, and protection watchers provided the operational backbone — the men and women who carried camera equipment through difficult terrain, serviced stations in remote areas accessible only on foot, and maintained the deployment schedule across eight months and all weathers.
Technical and research support was provided by the reserve’s in-house biology team and by the Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society — HYTICOS — a Hyderabad-based conservation organisation with two decades of field experience across Telangana’s tiger landscapes. Founded by Imran and Asif Siddiqui, HYTICOS has been involved in tiger monitoring in the Kawal and Amrabad landscapes since 2002 and played a foundational role in the scientific work that supported Kawal’s declaration as a tiger reserve. In AITE 2026, HYTICOS contributed to sampling design, field staff training, camera deployment logistics, photographic data management, and preliminary analysis — a forest department-NGO partnership model that has consistently strengthened Telangana’s scientific monitoring capacity. Additionally, 1,129 trained volunteers from HYTICOS, WWF-India, Animal Warriors Conservation Society, Deccan Birders, and Friends of Snakes Society contributed to field data collection under departmental supervision during Phase I ground surveys.
AITE 2026 IN AMRABAD: THE NUMBERS
▸ 2,611sq km — total reserve area covered, November 2025 to June 2026
▸ 2sq km grids — spatial framework dividing the entire reserve
▸ 2,240 camera traps at 1,120 paired stations — bilateral flank photography protocol
▸ 4 operational blocks — each with ~30-day continuous camera activity
▸ 8 months — total survey duration (November 2025 – June 2026)
▸ 1,129 trained volunteers — from HYTICOS, WWF, Animal Warriors, Deccan Birders, Friends of Snakes
▸ 42 individuals identified — 18 females, 14 males, 2 sub-adults, 8 cubs
▸ Population trajectory — ~14 tigers (c.2015), 26 adults (2023-24), 36 (2024-25), 42 (AITE 2026)
▸ AI surveillance pilot — sanctioned April 2026 for Amrabad; PTZ cameras, thermal imaging, GIS integration
42 Tigers, What the Composition Tells Us
The preliminary analysis of AITE 2026 camera-trap data from Amrabad has identified 42 individual tigers: 18 adult females, 14 adult males, 2 sub-adults, and 8 cubs. The population estimate is a minimum count — the number of individuals whose stripe patterns have been uniquely matched across the camera-trap record — rather than a statistically modelled total that accounts for detection probability. The final published figure in the 2027 NTCA report will incorporate capture-recapture analysis to estimate the total population size including animals that the camera grid may have missed, and will be accompanied by confidence intervals reflecting the statistical uncertainty inherent in any survey of this complexity.
The demographic composition is the most scientifically significant aspect of the preliminary results. Eighteen adult females in a population of 42 identified individuals — a female proportion of 43 percent of identified adults — is a strong indicator of reproductive health. Tiger populations that have undergone demographic stress from poaching, habitat degradation, or social disruption typically show skewed sex ratios toward males, because females with cubs are more sedentary, harder to detect in camera traps, and more vulnerable to conflict-related mortality when prey is scarce. A balanced adult sex ratio suggests that Amrabad’s population is not merely growing but doing so through natural, healthy demographic processes rather than through male dispersal from external populations filling a demographic vacuum.
The eight cubs — representing approximately 19 percent of identified individuals — are the most direct evidence of successful, ongoing breeding. Cubs in a camera-trap survey represent tigers born within the preceding year to two years, depending on age class. Their presence in eight individuals confirms that multiple breeding females are actively raising young, that prey availability is sufficient for lactating females to sustain themselves and their cubs, and that the reserve’s anti-poaching infrastructure is protecting vulnerable family groups effectively enough for cubs to survive to camera-trappable age. In the 2024-25 Phase IV monitoring that preceded AITE 2026, 36 individuals were documented — 13 males, 20 females, 2 cubs, and 1 unidentified. The increase from 2 to 8 cubs between the two surveys is a striking indicator of accelerating reproductive output.
The population trajectory over the past decade maps the reserve’s conservation arc with unusual precision: approximately 14 tigers around 2015, rising to 26 adults in 2023-24, 36 individuals in the 2024-25 Phase IV survey, and now 42 in AITE 2026. This is not a linear growth curve — the steepening of the trajectory in 2024-26 is consistent with a population beginning to approach the exponential phase of logistic growth in a recovering ecosystem. Whether that trajectory continues, plateaus, or generates conflict-related mortality as it pushes against the landscape’s ecological limits depends directly on the management interventions — prey augmentation, lantana management, water infrastructure — that the forest department continues to implement.
Eighteen adult females in 42 identified individuals — 43 percent of identified adults. A balanced sex ratio in a recovering tiger population is the most reliable single indicator that growth is driven by healthy breeding rather than by male dispersal filling a demographic vacuum.
What Made the Numbers Rise
Understanding the Amrabad recovery requires looking beneath the census figures at the ecological interventions that produced them. The reserve’s improvement has been neither accidental nor primarily the result of passive protection. It has resulted from a sustained, multi-year programme of active habitat management — the most scientifically significant component of which has been the large-scale removal of invasive weed species and the restoration of native grassland.
Lantana camara, Eupatorium, and Parthenium had colonised significant portions of Amrabad’s dry deciduous forest understorey, suppressing native grasses and forbs, reducing the forage base for chital, sambar, and other ungulates, and creating structurally homogeneous habitat that reduced the diversity of microhabitats supporting different prey species. Approximately 5,036 hectares of weed-infested habitat have been treated across the reserve — 4,105 hectares in Amrabad Division, 884 hectares in Achampet Division, and 46 hectares in Nagarjunasagar Division — in a programme funded through the combined resources of central government CAMPA allocations, state government wildlife funds, the Tiger Conservation Foundation, and corporate CSR contributions.
Weed clearance alone is insufficient; Lantana camara regenerates rapidly from rootstock and from bird-dispersed seeds, and can recolonise cleared areas within two to three years without active follow-up management. The Amrabad programme has therefore combined mechanical removal — primarily the cut-root-stock technique that severs the plant below the root-shoot transition point — with grassland restoration through native grass seed collection, soil preparation, and enrichment planting. Restoration efforts have been concentrated in ecologically critical zones: around waterholes and percolation tanks where ungulate congregation amplifies the impact of improved forage; along stream corridors that function as wildlife movement routes; and in natural grassland patches whose recovery serves as anchor points for the expanding prey population.
Water infrastructure has been the third pillar of the habitat management programme. The Amrabad plateau has areas of seasonal water scarcity — particularly in the upper plateau zones where natural surface water disappears in the pre-monsoon months. More than 60 solar-powered borewells have been installed across the reserve with CSR, CAMPA, TCF, and state funding, replacing the previous system of weekly tractor water delivery that was both logistically demanding and ecologically insufficient. Currently, approximately 70 percent of the reserve has year-round water availability for wildlife; the remaining 30 percent requires additional waterholes, check dams, and solar pump sets to achieve complete coverage. Water availability directly determines prey distribution, which in turn determines tiger movement patterns and the spatial distribution of the population across the landscape.
A prey augmentation centre has also been established — a captive breeding programme for native ungulate species that supplements wild prey populations in areas where natural recovery is slow. This intervention, cited by Dr. Hiremath in his NSH interview, is an active, management-intensive response to the NTCA’s documented concern about Amrabad’s prey density relative to its growing tiger population. It represents the most direct acknowledgement in the reserve’s management record that population growth and prey recovery are not automatically synchronised and that active intervention is needed to close the gap.
From Camera Traps to AI Surveillance
AITE 2026’s field methodology at Amrabad represents the current state of the art in Indian wildlife monitoring technology. The 2,240-camera deployment using paired bilateral stations — coordinated through the M-STrIPES GPS-enabled patrol and monitoring application — generates a photographic dataset of considerable size and complexity. Individual tiger identification from this dataset is conducted using AI-assisted stripe-pattern recognition software, which in AITE 2026 incorporates three-dimensional modelling capability not available in the 2022 cycle. The 3D modelling extrapolates full stripe pattern geometry from partial or angled camera images, reducing the proportion of records classified as unidentifiable and improving the precision of individual counts.
Beyond the census itself, Amrabad has recently moved to adopt a broader technological surveillance architecture that positions it among the most technologically sophisticated reserves in southern India. A Telangana government announcement in April 2026 confirmed the sanction of an AI-based forest and wildlife surveillance system for pilot deployment in Amrabad — integrating Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras with thermal imaging capability, GIS mapping platforms, and forest fire detection algorithms into a unified monitoring interface. This system, when fully deployed, will complement the periodic camera-trap grid of AITE 2026 with continuous, real-time surveillance of reserve infrastructure and wildlife movement — a qualitative shift from quadrennial snapshot counting to persistent ecological monitoring.
Dr. Hiremath confirmed in his NSH interview that drones have also been recently procured for the reserve and that aerial surveys are being integrated into the patrolling and habitat monitoring programme. Drone surveys provide a capability that ground-based teams and fixed camera traps cannot replicate: rapid aerial assessment of fire incidents, identification of livestock incursion into core areas, and monitoring of wildlife movement in terrain inaccessible to on-foot patrol. The combination of ground-based M-STrIPES patrol data, fixed camera-trap grids, drone aerial surveys, and the incoming AI surveillance system constitutes a layered monitoring architecture whose information density is substantially greater than any single system can provide.
What AITE 2026 Cannot Yet Tell Us
Intellectual honesty requires naming what the Amrabad AITE 2026 exercise cannot yet resolve. The 42-individual preliminary count is a minimum documentation of individually distinguished tigers. The final capture-recapture analysis will produce a statistically modelled population estimate — almost certainly higher than 42, with confidence intervals reflecting detection probability — but that estimate will still be bounded by the precision of the modelling assumptions and the coverage completeness of the camera grid. In a landscape as large and topographically challenging as Amrabad, with areas that remain logistically difficult to access and survey at equivalent intensity, some individuals will inevitably have escaped detection.
More significantly for the reserve’s long-term conservation science, AITE 2026 does not yet have published data on the prey density and habitat quality parameters that are simultaneously being collected under the same survey protocol. Dr. Hiremath has identified three specific gaps in the current methodology that he believes should be addressed in future census cycles: systematic grassland quality assessment across the entire reserve area; supplementation of line transect prey surveys with vehicle-based counts along forest roads, to better capture the low-density, patchily distributed ungulate populations in rugged terrain; and systematic mapping of water source distribution and seasonal status. These are not academic suggestions. They are management-critical data that would allow the forest department to precisely target weed removal, waterhole construction, and prey augmentation efforts rather than distributing resources across the landscape without spatial guidance on where the ecological need is highest.
The genetic dimension of the Amrabad population is also largely undocumented in the public literature. The Amrabad-NSTR landscape has been identified by NTCA as an isolated block — the phrase implies reduced genetic exchange with tiger populations in central India or the Western Ghats. Whether the growing Amrabad population is maintaining genetic diversity through natural dispersal along the corridors connecting it to NSTR, or whether it is accumulating inbreeding depression through within-landscape breeding, is a question that requires microsatellite DNA analysis from scat samples — the same samples being collected during AITE 2026’s Phase IV field operations. That genetic data, when analysed, will determine whether Amrabad’s 42 tigers are demographically robust in the short term but genetically vulnerable in the medium term, or whether corridor connectivity is functioning at the biological level that population viability requires.
Prey, Conflict& the Satellite Science
The conservation trajectory of Amrabad Tiger Reserve over the next decade will be determined by the resolution of two interacting scientific challenges that the AITE 2026 results bring into sharp focus. The first is prey density. A tiger population of 42 in a 2,611 square kilometre reserve with NTCA-documented low prey density will increasingly generate dispersal pressure as the population grows. Dispersing sub-adults — particularly males between 18 and 30 months of age expelled from established territories — will move into the reserve’s peripheral forest zones and into the shared forest landscape between Amrabad and NSTR, where human settlements and agricultural land create the conditions for livestock predation and, potentially, human injury. The conflict mitigation data from the surrounding districts will be the next significant indicator of whether the recovery story is generating the social tensions that the population ecology predicts.
The second challenge is corridor connectivity — both within the Nallamala complex and beyond it. The contiguous forest block of Amrabad and NSTR (over 6,300 sq km) provides the immediate dispersal landscape, and the southern boundary’s Krishna River corridor connects to the Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve and, through it, to the Tirupati landscape and the Eastern Ghats forest chain. Whether these corridor segments are functionally intact for tiger dispersal — whether animals are actually moving through them, depositing scat detectable by DNA sampling, and contributing to genetic exchange — is a question that AITE 2026’s Phase IV data is uniquely positioned to begin answering if the analysis includes spatial mapping of individual movement patterns and genetic sample collection.
The Telangana government’s investment in Amrabad’s conservation infrastructure — the NTCA weed management grants, the 60-plus solar borewells, the prey augmentation centre, the AI surveillance system pilot, the drone fleet — reflects a genuine and sustained political commitment to the reserve’s ecological health. The science, as represented by the AITE 2026 results and by Dr. Hiremath’s frank assessment of remaining infrastructure gaps, confirms that this commitment is producing measurable results. Forty-two tigers where fourteen existed a decade ago is a scientifically significant achievement in a landscape that the national authority considered at risk.
But the same scientific rigour that documents the achievement also demands that we read it fully — including the prey density concern, the absence of a dedicated ecologist, the 30 percent of the reserve without year-round water, and the 15 base camps that exist only in the management plan rather than in the forest. Conservation science is not a success-only narrative. It is the disciplined practice of measuring reality as precisely as available tools allow, and using those measurements to guide the next intervention. AITE 2026 has given Amrabad the most precise measurement of its tiger population in its history. The science now requires that the measurement be followed by the management.
