Tiger reappearance in Bhutan's Bumdeling Wildlife Sanctuary: a case for maintaining effective corridors and metapopulations

Abstract

The tiger Panthera tigris is globally 'Endangered'(Goodrich et al., 2015). The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan is an important stronghold (Tempa et al., 2019) for this ecologically and economically important apex predator (Estes et al., 2011; Thinley et al., 2018). Here, we report the reappearance of the tiger in Bumdeling Wildlife Sanctuary (BWS) in north-eastern Bhutan (Fig. 1a), after a likely absence of 12 years.