Wild tigers have been running through the lush plains of Hrishita Negi’s mind for as long as she can remember.
Truth be told, few people on Earth are as intimately acquainted with the animals as she is. She was literally raised among the majestic felines, the largest living cat species in the world, growing up on the Kanha Tiger Reserve, a vast expanse of grassland and forest in central India.
She doesn’t remember the first time she saw a wild tiger with her own eyes, but estimates she was probably four or five years old. Her father, Himmat Negi, was the reserve’s field director, and she would ride with him often as he surveyed the park in his jeep. Encountering tigers was a regular occurrence, but she says no matter how many times you see a wild tiger, it is always extraordinary.
“Seeing a wild tiger is unmatched,” says Negi during an interview in a conference room in Barre Hall. She leans forward across the table and gestures excitedly as she speaks, her verve warming the utilitarian atmosphere of the room.
“When a tiger walks by, you forget everything you had in your mind,” she says. “You’re just completely in the moment, looking at this beautiful predator. You almost go into a trance state.”
One of Negi’s favorite memories is riding elephants into the forest, something her father and his team would do to track tigers, as it allowed them to blend into the ecosystem better than if they were in motorized vehicles.
“One time, we were sitting on our elephants watching this tigress eating her prey, and she kept looking up and growling,” recalls Negi. “We couldn’t figure out why, but then the whole story surfaced in front of us when we spotted a leopard up in this tree. The tiger had stolen the leopard’s prey, and it couldn’t do anything about it. We stayed there and watched for a good 45 minutes while that was playing out in front of our eyes.”
Negi is the first to admit she had an extraordinary childhood, but when it came time to go to college, she had to move away from her remote home. She attended the University of New Delhi and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in biology. She was charging straight down the path to follow in her father’s footsteps, but her life changed dramatically in 2019 when she attended the Global Tiger Forum, the only inter-governmental body that works to conserve tigers. There, she learned about the Tigers United University Consortium, a group of four American universities with tiger mascots, led by Clemson University. The program offered scholarships to doctoral students who aimed to dedicate their lives to tiger conservation. She couldn’t believe it. It was like somebody had designed a Ph.D. program just for her.
She pounced on the opportunity and went from studying tigers in India to being a Tiger in America.
AI innovation and conservation
Negi was a natural fit to take on the Tigers United mission at Clemson: To save wild tigers in India and worldwide through education, training, research, technology, and raising awareness. She was hired to be Yarrow’s associate director of the program immediately after earning her Ph.D. in May.
Negi leaned into the technology pillar with a fellow Ph.D. post-doctoral researcher, Jeremy Dertien, and devised a system of camera traps that uses artificial intelligence to identify and track tigers. In 2022, Negi and Dertien facilitated a partnership between Clemson, Global Tiger Forum, the National Tiger Conservation Authority, and RESOLVE to implement a system of AI-enabled trail cameras in the corridor between two of the most prominent tiger reserves in India, the Kanha and Pench, to detect and send images of wild tigers instantaneously.
“The Indian government created corridors because tiger ecology cannot contain itself in one area,” says Negi. “It’s a big animal and requires a lot of territory. Since tiger reserves are inviolate spaces, created in a way that excludes human disturbances, the corridors between reserves are the perfect places to set up our system.”
Negi and Dertien’s AI tiger camera trap, which they named TrailGuard AI, was the first of its kind, and almost immediately proved to be a game-changer. It transmitted images to the cell phones and computers of park managers and other concerned entities in real-time.
“It will do the same thing as every other camera trap, wherein it will sense motion and take a photo, but instead of storing thousands and thousands of photos, the AI can identify and store only images of tigers,” explains Negi. “The camera system has a communication box that connects to the nearest cell tower and shares the images with the end user. The connectivity is so good, even in these remote areas of India, that our end users – the forest department staff – get the images in less than 30 seconds.”
The instant communication with forest rangers soon had an unforeseen benefit when the cameras started snapping photographs of poachers in the middle of their crimes.
“We help them catch poachers before they make a kill,” boasts Negi.
The cameras are highly efficient in terms of battery life and size, making them virtually invisible to poachers and self-sufficient in the forests for long periods of time.
To date, TrailGuard AI has contributed to the arrests of more than 20 poachers.
Traditions, partnerships and business plans
Thanks to the work of tiger conservation pioneers like Negi’s father, India’s tiger conservation efforts have been encouragingly successful, to the point that it’s causing issues with human populations in parts of the country, says Greg Yarrow, professor of wildlife ecology and the director of Tigers United.
“Hrishita has developed six priority areas for Tigers United to move forward, all centered on tiger conservation, but also taking into account that conservation efforts in some areas have been so successful the tigers are bleeding out into communities adjacent to reserves and causing issues with human conflict,” Yarrow explains. “Working with those communities has become a big part of the effort. Tigers United is research-based, but community engagement, extension, and outreach are equally important.”
“The goal is to raise money to help the villages around the corridor coexist with tigers,” says Negi. “These communities have a deep reverence for tigers. They are entwined with their culture, rituals and traditions. They don’t see tigers as a dangerous predator, so we try to highlight those nuances.”
Wendy York, dean of the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business and Tigers United board member, traveled to India as part of a contingent with Tigers United in 2023 to see the challenges facing the consortium for herself and better formulate a plan to meet them.
“India is an amazing and complex country, much like the important work of tiger conservation,” says York. “Tigers are incredible creatures, and their preservation is equally complex. The paradox is this: the more successful we are at increasing tiger populations, the more likely we are to face boundary conflicts between humans and tigers. How do we simultaneously grow and protect both populations when land and resources are finite?”
Negi believes a good first step will be creating a business plan through a partnership with York’s college to platform indigenous artists from the area.
“We want to create a business plan that can provide access to all these traditional indigenous communities that have outstanding arts and crafts but are not empowered economically,” says Negi. “Ideally, that business plan will create more venues for them and improve their economies, making it less desirable to risk poaching for money.”
Currently, Clemson stands alone in its ability to impact tiger conservation in India, Negi says.
“What makes Tigers United so unique is that we have forged partnerships with all the important government entities in India that work on tiger conservation, all the way up to the Prime Minister,” she says. “We have access for conservation work in India that no other university does, and we aim to make the most of it.”
Apex species, oceans apart
“Why should South Carolinians care about wild tigers in India?” Yarrow asks rhetorically. “Because there are many more parallels between here and there than people might think.”
For instance, Clemson received significant funding from the state just last year to develop a program to address crop damage by deer and wild hogs, which cost farmers more than $200 million yearly, according to the South Carolina Farm Bureau.
Research has shown that tigers help suppress the wildlife that damage crops in India, says Yarrow.
“They have value added as crop protection, so that’s pretty cool,” he says. “That’s coexistence. The same problem is in both places, only here hunters are the apex species controlling the deer population.”
Yarrow says another good example of a parallel is the effort to save bobcats on Kiawah Island. The 15-square-mile island, 20 miles from Charleston, provides an ideal habitat for bobcats and had one of the densest bobcat populations in the country until 2018, when their numbers sharply declined. As the bobcat population plummeted, an overabundance of deer began to wipe out native plant species. When wildlife biologists discovered it was due to the use of pesticides, locals took swift action to ban their use on the island.
“South Carolina, in turn, implemented a ban on those pesticides, the first state in the nation to do so,” says Yarrow. “I mention all this because, again, it’s coexistence. You’ve got the same thing in India with tigers.”
It’s personal
Clemson’s wholehearted support of Tigers United has cemented it as an international leader in tiger conservation, says Yarrow, which is something to be especially proud of considering the University’s beloved mascot.
“How fitting that Clemson is taking the lead to save wild tigers,” he says. “One really exciting thing is it checks all the Clemson Elevate boxes while being the right thing to do. And after meeting Hrishita, oh my gosh, I knew she would be the perfect person to lead this. So, the plan is to transition the whole program over to her in the next year.”
Negi’s plans for Tigers United include improving the TrailGuard AI system to track individual tigers, expanding it to other tiger landscapes and even programming it to track other endangered animals, as well as growing their outreach programs to educate the people who live near the reserves and creating more pipelines for indigenous artists to show and sell their work.
“For me, it’s personal,” she says. “I grew up with an extreme fondness for tigers, and we’re living in a time when biodiversity decline is unprecedented. What’s needed is to focus on saving key species that play important roles in entire ecosystems, and there’s no better option than the most majestic apex species of them all – the tiger.”
