A training seminar on Conservation Assured Tiger Standards (CATS) was held in Indonesia on 13−16 October. The main goal of CATS is to implement in protected areas management standards that have the greatest impact on preserving and restoring tiger populations.

The seminar was attended by representatives of national committees and protected areas from 10 tiger-range countries. At the end of the meeting, a supervisory board was formed, headed by a Bhutan ministry representative. Russia will be represented by Sergei Aramilev, director general of the Amur Tiger Centre.

“Any certification is a sort of quality mark. CATS certification is not just an indicator of the government’s performance in terms of assuring the quality of work done in protected areas concerning tigers, but also an indicator of public environmental organisations’ performance, a sort of trajectory that shows that we should be investing in this exact protected area if we want to improve the quality of work done concerning the preservation of Amur tiger populations,” Aramilev said.

The tiger habitat certification was developed by international environmental organisations, such as the Global Tiger Forum (GTF), WWF’s Tigers Alive Initiative, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, and the World Commission of Protected Areas, and includes 17 standards that allow for managing tiger habitats and evaluating the effectiveness of this management.

In September 2015, the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve became the first nature reserve in Russia to receive the CATS certificate. Other candidates include Land of the Leopard National Park, the Lazovsky Nature Reserve, Call of the Tiger National Park and Anyuisky National Park.