Changing with the times - how tech has improved tiger conservation

Raised on a forest farm in Northeast China, Liu Duo has grown up with a strong bond to the same forests where some of the last remaining population of Amur tigers roam. As part of WWF China’s anti-poaching team, Liu Duo has witnessed how conservation has changed over the years: natural scenery, species, policies, strategies and most especially, technology. He walks us through the decade of change.

How or why did you make your way into tiger conservation?

Actually, it was through a connection with my father’s friend. He was the director of the Wildlife Department and he was collaborating with WWF for the anti-poaching programme. At the beginning, I didn’t have any ideas about tigers. All the news came from him and he taught me a lot because he had been working in that area for almost 10 years.

I grew up on a farm near mountains and forests in Northeast China, the very forests I am now working to protect, so nature has always been close to my life. To follow in my father’s footsteps, as he was also involved in this sector, and to serve the places I feel deeply connected to makes all the hours spent in this field even more worthwhile. 

What does an ‘anti-poaching officer’ do?

Everyday on the job looks different.  From setting up and maintaining camera traps to supporting nature reserves in other ways such as setting up an Anti-poaching Supervision and Evaluation Mechanism Pilot (SAMAP), introducing new management tools and helping to train rangers — my role is multifaceted. 

Working closely with rangers, who are often first responders in the effort to tackle poaching, is also a core part of my job. Their tireless work in some of the world's harshest working conditions never fails to inspire me.

How often do you see tigers in China?

Tigers are really deeply ingrained in the culture of China. My mother is a tiger – she was born in the Year of the Tiger. Even some of the areas in my hometown are named after the tiger. I was really curious as to why, but my friend checked and found out that these places are part of the historical tiger range.

Some animals mean bad things and some mean good things. The tiger is one of the good things. It means power. It symbolises wealth and health. In China, you can see that people really like to wear clothing and fashion accessories which have tiger symbols.

Sadly, this symbolism has also led to widespread poaching of tigers for their parts and products, which makes my work as an anti-poaching officer that much more important.

And how about the wild tigers, what kind of attitude do people have towards them where you live?

The tiger is sometimes seen as a monster, a beast. In my grandfather’s generation, they needed to go to the forest to collect timber and many people didn’t have much protection, so they were really afraid of tigers. In their time, tigers sometimes attacked locals, so they would stay away from tigers or kill them. 

But when they realised that the tiger was gone, it also became really hard. In my generation, we don’t have tigers in my hometown anymore. Now the wild boars and deers go to farms and eat the crops and it’s also hard for the local people, so they realise the tigers were actually also protecting the area.

What’s one moment in the tiger recovery period 2010-2022 that sticks out to you?

In 2010, there were only around 20 wild tigers in China and we had little hope that tigers were even breeding within the country. That was until 2014, when camera traps captured a tigress and her playful cubs in the Wangqing-Hunchun-Dongning Area,  30 kilometres from the Russia-China border. This footage was the first infrared video of a tiger family so deep in China, which spurred a lot of hope for tiger recovery in inland China. It showed that tigers were breeding in China after nearly being pushed to single digits. In the past, the only evidence of Amur tigers so distant from the border area was through elusive paw prints but here we had a full 10-second video of a happy family. 

Amur tigers were once found throughout northern China, the Russian Far East and the Korean peninsula. By the 1940s, logging and hunting had driven them to the brink of extinction—with no more than 40 individuals remaining in the wild. Many years of conservation work had helped make this possible for this tiger family and hopefully many more across China.

So what’s it like to be a tiger where you are right now?

The population of tigers in China is slowly increasing, after many years of sustained conservation investment and commitment, but the situation is still fragile. The official number of tigers in the national park we work in is 50, including cubs.

We are hopeful because the central government has the ability to implement these conservation strategies, but they need time. They have the technology and they have a team of experts.

In your perspective,  how has tiger conservation changed over the past decade?

In the past 10 years, wildlife monitoring technology has rapidly advanced. Before, we relied only on traditional camera trap monitoring to collect data but in many places, new technology is widening opportunities to better monitor the species and tackle poaching. 

For example, in some places in China, Universities are piloting integrated ‘air-earth’ monitoring methods using a combination of drones and cameras. This has allowed conservationists to conduct real-time monitoring. There is still a lot in this area to explore and develop but the innovation has been inspiring. Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is also becoming more widely used across the conservation sector to distinguish between types of species recorded on camera traps. In the past, rangers needed to be skilled to recognise and separate all the images by themselves, which was very time consuming.

One camera trap can collect 2,000-3,000 images at a time. Rangers would have to go to the location to collect the data and bring it back, which in itself would take months as they’re placed in very remote locations. Once they’ve been retrieved, it takes weeks to process the images and identify all species in the survey. So the fact that new technology is speeding up this process means we can work more efficiently to protect tigers from poaching in the decades to come.

Where do you go from here?

In late 2022, we and other NGOs had a workshop with the National Forest and Grassland Bureaus’ directors. They have plans to do a top-level nationwide ranger training across the whole of China. Previously, people were just focused on their own areas, but now we have ways to help improve rangers’ capacity.

Rangers are also being trained to use social media to [share] their voice. They also teach them what kinds of stories the public are interested in to work on public awareness raising.

This year we have a new programme with the Northeast Forestry University. Some groups are also working on bringing new cable technology to China’s forested areas. These cables are placed in key areas where tigers and other large predators often venture. When they step on the cable or even come near to it, it sends an alert to neighbouring local communities. This technology is now being used in some areas where human wildlife conflict has been a challenge. Hopefully we’ll see some results soon!

What has been one area of your work in the past 12 years of tiger conservation that sticks out to you the most?

One area of work has been how to improve the welfare of rangers, particularly community rangers. In the past three years, we’ve been collaborating with our partners to improve anti-poaching management by working more closely with a wider range of people. 

It’s paying off, we’re seeing tiger numbers continue to slowly rise in China and hopefully this momentum will increase in the decades ahead. Improving their [rangers] welfare and capacity will be a major area of focus in the decades ahead.