PSY6422
This project aimed to elucidate the number and gender of Sumatran tigers inhabiting the three major national parks of Sumatra. The project utilises both a shapefile of Indonesia from GADM.org and a dataset containing the number and gender of tigers sighted across an eight month span in 2014, acquired directly from Luskin et al.'s (2017) research.
The primary findings were that across the three national parks, only 24 different tigers were sighted, with the majority confined to Bukit Barisan Selatan national park. A large part of this research was based on the recent findings that whilst tiger numbers are declining and the species is critically endangered, there are increasingly more tigers inhabiting these national parks, as being protected world heritage sites, their forests remain largely intact and preserved from deforestation comparatively to other areas. This project reinforced this idea, by highlighting the three major national parks as a means to demonstrate the confinement of these tigers within Sumatra, and by offering a breakdown of the number and gender of these tigers in each national park, which allowed for some disucssion of other contributing factors to their decline, such as the larger proportion of male tigers comparatively to female tigers.