Kanha–Pench — Landseed

Map key

Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings

Reserve corebuffer not drawn

Other protected areas

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Tiger

Hard-ground barasingha

Gaur

Dhole

Leopard

Sloth bear

Chital

Sambar

Rusty-spotted cat

Highways & main roads

Park gate / crossing structures

Mapped settlement

Altitude, our DEM

778–902 m

693–778 m

596–693 m

490–596 m

Bands are altitude, not vegetation: sal, teak and bamboo all grow across several of them. The tint paints only inside the Kanha core, which is the ground these thresholds were measured on.

Kanha Tiger Reserve

A block of 917.43 km² of critical tiger habitat in the Maikal hills of the Satpuras, inside a reserve of 2,074.31 km². The line drawn here is the CORE. The buffer around it is not drawn anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate rather than an omission.

Core

917.43 km² critical tiger habitat

Buffer

1,134.31 km² stated, not drawn

Boundary

240 km as digitised

Compactness

0.20 Polsby–Popper

National park

1955

Elevation

490 – 902 m

Among Project Tiger's first nine reserves — national park 1 June 1955, tiger reserve 1973

The last wild hard-ground barasingha — NTCA records Kanha as holding the only surviving population in the world

Thirty-two of the forty-five forest villages once inside the core have been relocated — “voluntarily” in NTCA’s wording.

Why this landscape matters beyond Kanha

It is one population, not two parks. NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India count Kanha, Pench and Achanakmar as a single block of 360 tigers (SE 12) across 11,400 km² — the largest connected tiger population in the Central Indian landscape.

The corridor is inhabited, and it works anyway. The 2022 estimation camera-trapped the corridor's forest divisions separately and identified 97 individual tigers in them, at densities between 0.81 and 1.77 per 100 km² — three to seven times below the cores, but not zero, across ground shared with several hundred villages.

The first field study of wild tigers happened here. George Schaller worked at Kanha in 1963–65; The Deer and the Tiger (University of Chicago Press, 1967) came out of it. No figure on this site is taken from that book — it is named because it is part of why Kanha matters, not used as a data source.

Areas, dates and village counts: National Tiger Conservation Authority, Government of India — brief notes for Kanha and Pench Tiger Reserves. Tiger figures: NTCA & Wildlife Institute of India, Status of Tigers, Co-predators & Prey in India 2022. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 15588876. Note: that OSM ring measures 949.84 km² against NTCA's stated 940 km² national park — a +1.0% agreement, unusually close. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring and are scale-dependent, so the true boundary is longer. No buffer boundary is drawn for either reserve: the buffer areas are stated from NTCA and nothing is drawn in their place.

Pench imagery: Sentinel-2 median of 24 scenes, 4–19 October 2026; 0.43% of the frame had too few clear views and shows no imagery. · Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data · Elevation: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved (Copernicus GLO-30). The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30. · Protected areas, water, roads & settlements: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for the National Tiger Conservation Authority, the Wildlife Institute of India, or the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department.