Research overview: tiger reserves as a protected-area model

Tiger reserves, especially in India, embody a particular protected-area model built around strictly protected cores surrounded by multiple-use buffer zones, often combined with voluntary relocation of villages from cores. This overview surveys research evaluating this model's performance for big cat conservation. Studies show that well-managed cores can act as powerful source populations, producing the dispersers that sustain tigers across wider landscapes, while buffers attempt to balance human use with conservation. Researchers also examine the social costs and controversies of relocation, the importance of buffer management, and how reserve effectiveness varies with enforcement and prey protection. The overview frames the tiger-reserve model as one of the most intensively studied approaches to protecting a large carnivore in a densely populated landscape, offering lessons, both encouraging and cautionary, for designing protected areas that must reconcile strict species protection with the needs of surrounding human communities.