Wild tigers are top predators and critical to maintaining ecosystem balance, including keeping forests healthy by preventing overgrazing and contributing to biodiversity by maintaining balanced prey populations. For tigers to do this, they need large areas of healthy and well-connected habitat to move safely, find food, and breed.
Today tigers are found in just about 8% of the places they lived in just a couple of hundred years ago. Increasing global tiger range is critically important for restoring nature loss and must happen in a way that benefits local communities. To support an increase in wild tiger populations and ensure human-tiger coexistence, we need to secure parts of their historic range and allow tigers to return there. These rewilded spaces can support both biodiversity and people.
But how can tigers reach areas that they no longer occupy?
What tiger range expansion means and how can it be done
One way to increase tiger habitat is natural range expansion, when tigers disperse from their breeding areas to new locations. This often happens when an area reaches what is called its ‘carrying capacity’— meaning the habitat reaches the maximum number of tigers it can support due to the availability of prey, the size of the habitat, and the number of tigers that are already living there. Tigers may also move out of an area, even if the carrying capacity hasn’t been met. However, in both scenarios, tigers require good connectivity to move safely and freely through a landscape. In places where the lines between tiger habitat and human settlements blur, natural range expansion can sometimes help manage human-tiger conflict.
Another way to expand tiger range is through tiger translocations. This requires human intervention to physically move multiple tigers from one place to another, starting from an area in the wild or a science-based captive breeding program. Wild-to-wild tiger translocations are more commonly used and are the preferred method over using captive tigers.
An effective and important conservation practice, translocation is also costly and requires significant pre-planning, such as community engagement, habitat and prey restoration, and continuous animal monitoring after the release. Translocation is preferred when wild tigers can be reintroduced to a place where they once lived but are unable to move back through natural dispersal. In Kazakhstan in Central Asia, wild tigers were wiped out in the mid-20th century, largely because of targeted hunting. Though there is still healthy tiger habitat there, the nearest wild tiger population is now thousands of miles away. In 2024, two tigers were translocated to Kazakhstan from a shelter for big cats in the Netherlands. Additional tigers will be brought to Kazakhstan from a combination of accredited zoos and foreign wild populations, to re-establish this majestic carnivore to its rightful home.
