Patna: The Valmiki Tiger Reserve of the state is going to host a training programme of officials who would monitor the quadrennial exercise of counting the big cats across the country.

The previous tiger census was held in 2013-14.

The training has jointly been organised by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun. The programme would be organised from December 26 to 28.

Officials from Jim Corbett National Park, Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, Rajaji National Park, Dudhwa National Park and VTR from India and those from the Bardia National Park, Chitwan National Park and Parsa Wildlife Reserve in Nepal would take part in the training programme during which they would also be briefed about the use of M-STrIPES (monitoring system for tiger intensive protection and ecological status), a mobile app which is used for gathering information from the field and sharing the same with the officials concerned using the android phone. The app is GPS-enabled and also provides the facility of geo-tagging the location from where the information is gathered.

The app provides data storage and reports generating tools with which the information provided by the field staff from the spot is shared at the control room set up in the tiger reserve and other agencies associated with the census work.

Six trainers from the WII, including senior scientist Qamar Quereshi and NTCA assistant inspector-general Vaibhav Mathur would be in the role of trainer in the programme which is being organised in Bihar for the first time.

Sharing details about the tiger census work, a WII project scientist, who would be part of the WII team of trainers, said: "The tiger census is one of the world's largest exercise of wildlife estimation where around 33,000 forest guards and 100 researchers from tiger range states of India work together."

He said the entire exercise is completed in three phases.

In the first phase, all the forest beats are sampled for carnivore signs, herbivore abundance, vegetation and anthropogenic disturbance indices.

In the second phase, remote sensing data on habitat change, human disturbance and land use changes are collected. In the third phase, all the tiger reserves and selected area are sampled by camera trap for tiger photographs.

"All the three phases data are later integrated in statistical framework and the tiger population of entire country is estimated," he said.

The WII project scientist said that before undertaking the exercise, the training programme is conducted to make the officials and field staff aware of the protocols and methods for data collection. "After completion of training, the trained personnel would impart training to their respective staff," he added.

The training programme is being organised for different regions at different places and for the southern region it was organised from December 5 to 7 at Bandipur National Park in Karnataka. For the central Indian states, it is being held from December 19 to 21 at Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. The one to be held at VTR from December 26 to 28 would be for northern Indian states whereas the training programme for northeast Indian states would be held from January 8 to 10 at Kaziranga National Park in Assam.

Speaking about the likely time to be taken for collecting data from the field for tiger census work, an official of VTR said it would be completed by March end and then the data would be sent to WII for analysis.

The timing of the outcome of the census report is decided after completion of data analysis work at the WII end as the all-India figures are sent to the NTCA which releases the figures.