Research overview: India's national tiger camera-trap assessment

India conducts one of the world's largest wildlife monitoring exercises, a periodic national tiger assessment that combines landscape-scale occupancy surveys with intensive camera trapping to estimate tiger numbers across the country. This overview surveys the tiered design, broad sign and occupancy surveys identify where tigers occur, while dense camera arrays at sampled sites identify individuals by stripe pattern and estimate density via capture-recapture, scaled up to national totals. It discusses the immense logistical coordination, the methodological debates over extrapolation and double-counting, and the program's role in tracking recovery and guiding policy. The overview highlights how camera trapping anchors the quantitative backbone of national tiger monitoring, producing the headline population figures that shape conservation funding, reserve management, and international commitments under tiger-range-country agreements.