This story is part of “How Tech Changed It” — The Better India’s series that looks at how technology has transformed the sectors, systems and everyday experiences around us. From how we travel and learn to how we farm, build, communicate and access healthcare, each story traces the journey from what it was like before to what it looks like today. Because technology isn’t just about new gadgets or breakthroughs — it can change how an entire sector works, making things faster, smarter, safer, more accessible and more efficient.
The forest is quiet just before sunrise. A sambar calls somewhere beyond the sal trees. Leaves rustle along a narrow trail, and on the soft earth, there is a familiar sign: the four-toed imprint of a tiger.
For decades, this was how much of the forest’s story was read — through pugmarks, tracks, scat and the trained eyes of forest guards walking kilometres each day.
Today, the same landscape can tell its story very differently. A GPS-enabled phone can record a patrol route, a camera trap can identify an individual tiger from its stripes, and an AI-enabled camera can potentially send an alert to a ranger within seconds.
The forest has not changed as much as the tools used to understand and protect it have.
When a pugmark was the evidence
Before smartphones, camera traps and artificial intelligence, monitoring a tiger often meant following its physical signs.
Forest staff would walk through tiger habitats, look for pugmarks and other signs, and record observations by hand. Pugmark censuses attempted to identify and count tigers by measuring and comparing their footprints, but the method depended heavily on the person recording the evidence and could be affected by differences in terrain, weather and interpretation.
From paper registers to GPS-enabled patrols, technology is giving forest guards a digital trail of where they have been and where protection is needed most. Photograph: (Wildtrails)
Patrolling, too, was largely a manual exercise. Routes, wildlife sightings and suspected signs of poaching were recorded in paper registers. Information existed, but moving it from the forest floor to the people who could act on it could take time.
The forest guard still had the most important tool: experience. But the system had limited ways of turning that experience into data that could be quickly mapped, compared, or acted upon.
Then the forest got a digital trail
The next shift came when technology began accompanying the person walking through the forest.
M-STrIPES — the Monitoring System for Tigers: Intensive Protection and Ecological Status — brought GPS, mobile applications and digital databases into tiger-reserve management. Forest guards could record patrol tracks, wildlife observations, crime scenes and other field information with geotagged data. Managers could use this information to understand where patrols were happening and where protection efforts needed strengthening.
Then came the camera trap.
Placed along forest trails, these motion-triggered cameras could photograph animals without requiring a person to be present.
For tiger conservation, this changed population estimation dramatically: individual tigers could be identified from their unique stripe patterns, while enormous collections of photographs provided a much richer picture of wildlife populations.
India’s 2018 tiger assessment, for instance, used 26,838 camera-trap locations and generated more than 34 million wildlife photographs.
But there was still a catch.
Camera traps transformed tiger monitoring by allowing researchers to identify individual tigers from their unique stripe patterns, without disturbing the animals.
Photograph: (Think Evolve Consultancy)
The camera could see what happened. It could not necessarily tell a ranger that it was happening now.
Images often had to be physically retrieved and processed, making the technology enormously useful for monitoring and assessment, but less suited to preventing an incident in the moment.
From recording the forest to listening and watching in real time
That is where the latest generation of technology changes the equation.
Modern systems are beginning to put artificial intelligence directly at the point where an image or sound is captured.
Edge-AI cameras such as TrailGuard can analyse footage locally, identify people, vehicles or wildlife and transmit relevant alerts instead of waiting for an entire collection of photographs to be manually reviewed.
In trials in tiger landscapes, alerts from detected tiger images reached smartphones in roughly 30 seconds.
And cameras are no longer the only way technology is learning to read a forest.
AI-powered cameras can now analyse what they capture and send alerts to forest officials in near real time, helping turn observation into timely action. Photograph: (Korner of India)
At Pench, an AI-driven alert system is being tested using bioacoustics — essentially, listening to the forest. The system analyses distress or alarm calls from prey animals such as deer to detect signals associated with the presence of a big cat. Alerts can then reach forest officials and nearby communities, giving people time to respond before an encounter escalates.
Other systems are also being developed around real-time surveillance, including AI-enabled cameras and GSM-connected monitoring. The NTCA’s recent documentation notes deployments such as Garuda at Nagarahole, integrating AI, GSM camera traps and real-time monitoring to support wildlife protection and conflict management.
The biggest change is time
The evolution is not simply from paper to phone or pugmarks to cameras.
It is from looking backwards to respond to increasingly being able to respond while something is happening.
A pugmark told a forest guard that a tiger had passed. A camera trap could show which tiger it was. A GPS-enabled patrol system could show where guards had been. An AI system can potentially recognise a tiger, person or threat and send that information to someone who can act — while the tiger is still moving through the landscape.
From listening to alarm calls to analysing camera footage, new technologies are helping the forest ‘speak’ to those protecting it. Photograph: (WildTrails & Cow-Shed)
Technology, then, is not replacing the forest guard or the knowledge built over generations. It is extending what they can see, record and respond to.
And somewhere beyond the trees, the tiger continues doing what it has always done: walking its forest, leaving tracks behind.
The difference is that today, the forest can sometimes answer back in real time.
