Nepal counted 429 wild tigers, up from 355 four years ago

In December 2025 field teams installed 3,696 automatic cameras across 7,393 square kilometres of Nepal's lowland forest and left them running. By late April the cameras had taken 11,911 photographs of tigers. On 29 July 2026 Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation published what those pictures add up to: an estimated 429 wild tigers, up from 355 four years ago and from 121 when the country first counted.

How we know

The survey covered five national parks, Chitwan, Parsa, Bardiya, Banke and Shuklaphanta, together with the forest around them, divided into 1,548 grid cells two kilometres on a side. Each cell held a pair of camera traps, cameras that fire automatically when an animal walks past, left running for at least a fortnight; across every station that came to 36,191 camera days. Tigers turned up in 639 of the cells. Every tiger's stripe pattern is unique, so the photographs could be sorted into individual animals, and 373 separate tigers were identified that way. The population figure comes from capture-recapture, which estimates how many animals an area holds from how often the same known individuals reappear; the spatially explicit capture-recapture used here adds where each tiger was photographed, so the model can also account for animals whose range only partly overlaps the survey area. It puts the total at 429, with a range of 402 to 500: Chitwan 145, Bardiya 112, Parsa 71, Banke 51 and Shuklaphanta 50.

Why it matters

Tigers need room. A reserve big enough to hold a breeding population of them is big enough to hold the prey, the forest and the rivers inside it, which is why conservationists treat the tiger as an umbrella species, one whose protection shelters everything sharing its habitat. Nepal's department makes that argument itself, opening its announcement by calling the tiger an umbrella species before it reaches a single number. Nepal is one of thirteen countries with wild tigers left, and after the 2010 tiger summit in Russia set the goal of doubling numbers by 2022, it was one of the countries that managed it. The harder part starts now. More tigers in a densely settled country means more encounters with people, and the department has framed its next phase around coexistence, spotting problem tigers early and tourism built on tigers, with a stated aim of zero human deaths.