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Conservation of top carnivores like tigers are crucial for maintaining ecosystem integrity and evading cases of trophic cascade in a forest ecosystem. Around 70 % of Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) population is found in India and they are listed under the endangered category of IUCN redlist of threatened species. In this study, a habitat suitability analysis of tigers located in Rajaji National Park situated in Uttarakhand state of India is carried out. MaxEnt-A machine learning based model which uses a maximum entropy approach to define the distribution of species in a landscape is used in the study. Criteria such as vegetation type, fragmentation, disturbance index and biological richness along with anthropogenic (transportation, settlement) and topographical variables (elevation, ruggedness, slope and aspect) derived from satellite datasets were used in the estimation. Moreover, to make the study more realistic prey distribution was also taken into account. Presence data for the model were downloaded from GBIF. 70% of the data were used to calibrate the model and rest 30 % was used in validation of the results. Based on these criteria habitat suitability map of the study area was generated and further classified as highly suitable, moderately suitable, least suitable and not suitable for tigers. Furthermore, percentage contribution of variables and jackknife analysis for relative importance of variables was also carried out. The results indicated that the prey abundance highly contribute towards the habitat suitability of tigers in the region.

Animal behaviour such as dispersal and migration ensure their survival in the landscape. It has been established in the past few decades that wildlife conservation and study of their movement in the wilderness is vital for sustainable ecosystem. Thus, identification of regions having high movement permeability for planning and maintenance of functional wildlife corridors has turn out to be a fundamental requirement for habitat management. This study emphases on movement of big cats-Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) and Leopard (Panthera pardus fusca) in the protected area of Rajaji National Park situated in Uttarakhand State of India. The National park is a designated tiger reserve with large amount of tigers and leopards at its disposal. Here, Circuitscape was used to generate connectivity map of the study area. The results were validated using occurrence points downloaded from GBIF. The habitat suitability and resistance of the landscape was estimated based on literature review and expert opinion survey. Since, both the species have comparable ecological niche, similar habitat parameters were used for generation of resistance map of the species. Occurrence points for the species were downloaded from GBIF. 60% of the points were used as nodes or focal points where species presence is recorded whereas 40% of the points were used in validation of the connectivity paths. Results depicts the current density map of the study area highlighting areas with high connectivity for the species.

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