Research overview: genetic connectivity and corridors for tigers

Genetic studies have become central to understanding how tiger populations are linked across fragmented landscapes. This overview synthesizes work using DNA from scats, hair, and tissue to measure gene flow between reserves, identify corridors that dispersing tigers actually use, and detect populations suffering from isolation and inbreeding. It reviews how landscape genetics combines movement data with genetic markers to prioritize the corridors most important for maintaining diversity, and how small, disconnected populations lose variation and adaptive potential. The synthesis frames connectivity as essential to long-term tiger persistence in a human-dominated continent. For conservation audiences it explains why protecting individual reserves is not enough, why the strips of habitat linking them carry outsized importance, and how molecular tools reveal the hidden movements that knit scattered tiger populations into a viable whole.