VLADIVOSTOK, January 26. /TASS/. Ecologists will conduct a tiger "census" in the Russian Far East, looking for the Amur tiger on a vast territory from the Amur region to the south of the Maritime territory on February 1-15. The tiger population is counted once every ten years.

After a heavy snowfall hit the northern areas of the Maritime territory and the Khabarovsk region an unusually thick snow blanket covered the ground there, TASS was told by Sergey Aramilev — Director of the Maritime department of the Amur Tiger Center. "Tiger census takers will find it more difficult to work in heaps of snow in the taiga, but a possibility of counting one and the same animal twice has been narrowed because under such conditions tigers prefer to follow well-studied routes," Aramilev said.

Ten years ago the population of the Amur tiger in the south of the Russian Far East numbered 423-502 species or 95% of the overall world population of this kind of tiger species.

The ecologists have been planning to examine forest territories of around 150,000 square kilometers all in all, following 1,500 mapped out routes known to be used by tigers. The ecologists are planning to examine all of them and measure the size of tigers' paw prints. The tiger census will involve around 2,000 ecologists and volunteers.

If incidents of the Amur tiger crossing the Russo-Chinese state border are found out the Chinese colleagues will be notified about the "intruders" and will count the animals on the Chinese side of the state border, Aramilev said.