Motion-detecting cameras mounted in Chitwan National Park have shown tigers developing more nocturnal habits to avoid humans.

Washington — Tigers in a national forest in Nepal are modifying their behavior to better share the territory with humans, according to research by a U.S. and Nepalese scientific team.

The study was conducted at Chitwan National Park, which is tucked into a valley of the Himalayas and has a population of about 120 tigers. A team from the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University (MSU) put motion-detecting cameras in place on the roads and trails of the park.

After two seasons of observations, the team found that the tigers did most of their prowling at night, apparently to avoid the humans who are on the park trails in the daytime, gathering wood and grasses from the forest that are important resources to them. Typically, in other habitat, tigers move around at all times of the day and night, mating, hunting and surveying their territory.

“Tigers need resources, people need the same resources,” said Ph.D. student Neil Carter, who worked on the project with Jianguo Liu of MSU and three Nepalese scholars. “If we operate under the traditional wisdom that tigers only can survive with space dedicated only for them, there would always be conflict.”

Nepalese scientists who contributed to the study came from the Institute for Social and Environmental Research and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation and the World Wildlife Fund of Nepal.

The cameras, mounted in the forest with infrared lights, showed that people enter the preserve only during the day, with the tigers taking the nights.

“Sustainability can be achieved if we have a good understanding of the complicated connections between both worlds,” said Liu, who contributed to the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “We’ve found something very interesting is happening in Nepal that holds promise for both humans and nature to thrive.”

The U.S.-Nepalese research team also found that the Chitwan tiger population remains stable even while population is growing on the edges of the park. The conventional belief among wildlife conservationists is that tigers need a great deal of space unoccupied by humans, and frequently steps are taken to relocate the people or curtail the access to the resources in the tigers’ territory.

“There appears to be a middle ground where you might actually be able to protect the species at high densities and give people access to forest goods they need to live,” Carter said. “If that’s the case, then this can happen in other places, and the future of tigers is much brighter than it would be otherwise.”

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded the study.