The Forest Department will soon prepare a database that will list all tigers and leopards — animals found to be especially vulnerable to poaching — in the state. The cataloguing will be done with the help of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

Though the project is to be implemented in most of the tiger reserves in the country as an anti-poaching measure and to know the exact number of tigers, sources say reserves in the state like Pench and Melghat and those in Uttarakhand are at the forefront of this exercise as seven tigers and 47 leopards have been poached in the two states alone despite strict vigilance and other measures.