Siberian Tiger

Siberian Tiger: Species Facts

Range & Habitat

In Russia, the Amur (Siberian) tiger lives in Primorsky and Khabarovsk krais, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Amur Oblast, in the south of the Russian Far East. The Amur Tiger Center, set up by the Russian Geographical Society in 2013, puts its range at 206,000 km², of which 21 % lies in federal and regional protected areas and about 79 % in hunting grounds, and says that about 95 % of the world's Amur tigers live in these four Russian regions. After the 2022 census, in the winter of 2022/2023, a tigress with two cubs confirmed Amur Oblast as part of the range.^[7][3][8][4]

Its home is the mixed conifer and broadleaf forest; within it, the Amur Tiger Center says, the tiger prefers the Manchurian floodplain forests of the southern rivers. The Center describes it as the largest tiger subspecies and the only one able to live in snow, at hard frosts. A 2015 study of 770 scats at three sites in the Russian Far East found that wild boar, roe deer, sika deer and red deer together made up on average 86.7 % of the biomass tigers ate, and that wild boar was the preferred prey.^[7][5][12]

Territories are vast. According to the Amur Tiger Center, a male's area averages 100,000 hectares across the range, reaching 150,000 hectares in the north where hoofed prey is scarce, and a female's averages 45,000 hectares; where game is abundant these figures can be half as large. Tigers sometimes travel 70–100 km away from their own ground.^[7]

Sikhote-Alin. The Sikhote-Alin zapovednik (strict nature reserve) in Primorye is one of the reserves within the tiger's range, and the scientific literature calls it the Sikhote-Alin State Biosphere Zapovednik. Long-term monitoring there from 1966 showed a 41-year growth phase, with annual growth averaging 4.6 %, followed by a rapid decline between 2009 and 2012.^[7][10][11]

The most recent full census of the Amur tiger in Russia, carried out in 2022, put the population at no fewer than 750 animals, including cubs. This single, simultaneous count across the whole range is held once every ten years; its result was announced in September 2022 at the second International Tiger Conservation Forum in Vladivostok, where the Russian President's address, published by the Kremlin, gave about 750 tigers including cubs.^[3][4][2]

Earlier figures, for the record: according to the same 2022 address, twelve years earlier (around 2010) there were no more than 390 adult Amur tigers in the Russian Far East; the Amur Tiger Center wrote in 2023 that the population had grown from 500 to 750 over the previous ten years.^[2][16]

Threats

Poaching and other deaths caused by people. The Amur Tiger Center gives people as the cause of 72–83 % of tiger deaths, mainly through poaching, with natural deaths at 17–28 %. A study of tigers on and near the Sikhote-Alin reserve found mortality predominantly caused by people: 83 % of deaths among radio-collared tigers (1992–2005) and 78 % among reported dead tigers (1976–2000); 75 % of the collared tigers were poached, and all six collared young tigers that dispersed were poached. Poaching is illegal in Russia.^[8][9][2]

Roads. A study on and near the Sikhote-Alin reserve (1991–2000) found that adult females survived best in roadless areas and cubs survived less well where there were primary and secondary roads. Its authors recommend preventing new roads wherever possible in habitat managed for tigers and reducing access to secondary roads such as logging roads, and note that protected areas seem to stop working as source populations where road access exists.^[10]

African swine fever and the loss of prey. Wild boar is central to the Amur tiger's diet. African swine fever has spread through wild boar populations across East Asia, and reached the boar of the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik in 2020. The Amur Tiger Center said in December 2025 that tigers coming out towards people had been more noticeable in the winters of 2022–2023 and 2023–2024, when the consequences of the epizootic were more visible, and that the situation had since stabilised.^[12][14][3]

Conflict with people. According to the Amur Tiger Center, in Primorsky Krai the tigers that come to the edges of villages are animals harmed by people, wounded or injured and unable to hunt properly: more than 90 % of “conflict” tigers have gunshot wounds or other physical injuries. In 2025, 13 tigers in Primorsky Krai and 15 in Khabarovsk Krai were captured and removed from the wild; only some returned to the wild, some went to Russian zoos and some died in the rehabilitation centre of injuries received in the wild.^[3]

Disease and hard winters. Lethal canine distemper infections have been diagnosed in Amur tigers; a 2014 modelling study found that the virus could raise the 50-year extinction probability of the Sikhote-Alin reserve's tigers by 6.3 % to 55.8 %, depending on the risk scenario. The rapid decline of tigers in the reserve between 2009 and 2012 appeared to be tied to several factors, including poaching, severe winters and disease.^[13][11]

Conservation Status & Work

Panthera tigris: Endangered on the IUCN Red List (global assessment of the species, published in 2022). That category describes the tiger as a species across its whole world range. It is not the status of the Amur tiger population of the Russian Far East.^[1]

In Russia, the Amur tiger is listed in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation and in all the regional Red Data Books of the south of the Russian Far East, and it is in Appendix I of CITES. Hunting it has long been banned: the Amur Tiger Center found in the Khabarovsk regional archive a decision of 14 June 1948 that banned tiger hunting all year round across Khabarovsk Krai, a ban later extended to Primorsky Krai and then to the rest of the range. In 2022 the Russian President's address said that liability for poaching and illegal business in tigers had been tightened.^[5][16][2]

The scientific name in this page's subtitle, Panthera tigris altaica, is the one used by Russia's Amur Tiger Center, which calls the Amur tiger the northernmost tiger subspecies. The 2017 revision of cat taxonomy by the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group (published in 2017 in Cat News, Special Issue 11) includes the mainland tigers, among them those of Russia, in Panthera tigris tigris, and lists altaica among the names that subspecies now includes.^[8][6]

In 2024 Russia's Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology approved a new Strategy for the Conservation of the Amur Tiger in the Russian Federation, to 2034, with the Amur Tiger Center as a partner in carrying it out. Its priority measures include international cooperation, improving the legal framework and the network of protected areas, better protection outside protected areas, research, population monitoring, preventing and resolving conflicts, and education.^[4][8]

Recovery work. The 2022 presidential address credited the growth of the population to measures at state level and to the work of scientists and conservation organisations, and said a system for rehabilitating and reintroducing tigers had been created: cubs that had recovered and been trained for life in the wild were restoring the population in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and the Amur region, where tigers once lived and had disappeared. The state hunting inspectorate responds to every report of a tiger coming out towards people, and camera traps, drones, thermal imagers and artificial-intelligence algorithms are now used to study the populations.^[2][3]

Living alongside tigers. The Amur Tiger Center runs a voluntary, non-governmental programme that compensates local people for farm and domestic animals killed by tigers, so that people do not seek revenge on the predator; losses are made good with animals or feed, not money.^[15]