Kota Ullas Karanth is a conservation zoologist and a leading tiger expert based in Karnataka, India. He was the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India Programme. He is notable for pioneering the scientific use of camera traps in population density studies of large wild mammals in India. He was a Senior Conservation Scientist with the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Technical Director of the WCS Tiger Conservation Program. Karanth directed the WCS-I effort to help save Bengal tigers, and has conducted country-wide surveys to better estimate their population and habitat needs. Working mainly in the Nagarhole National Park, Karanth's work has demonstrated the importance of conserving prey populations in order to ensure the survival of keystone predator species such as the tiger. In 2007, Karanth was the second recipient of the World Wildlife Fund's annual J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership. In 2019, he became the first recipient of the George Schaller Lifetime Award in Wildlife Conservation Science from the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York. Early life Karanth is the son of noted Kannada writer, Shivaram Karanth. In his adolescence, Karanth read about naturalists trying to save tigers in Asia. While he resolved to join the effort, he did his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from KREC (now known as NITK), Suratkal, where he studied from 1966 to 1971. He then tried his hand at farming in Karnataka for several years. His amateur biological observations of the flora and fauna of his native Karnataka State in Southern India, under severe pressure from incompatible human activity, spurred him to investigate conservation models for the Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot. A 1983 meeting with a visiting Smithsonian Institution delegation paved the way for his travel to the US, where he studied in the National Zoo's Wildlife Conservation and Management Training Program in 1987. He obtained his master's degree in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Florida in 1988, and a Doctorate in Applied Zoology from Mangalore University in 1993. Studies on tiger populations His single longest project is the monitoring of the health of forests and biodiversity in Nagarahole Wildlife Sanctuary and National Park, Karnataka. Some results arising out of the study, on the status of tigers and their prey in particular, have been published in several scientific papers and books. Karanth pioneered the scientific application of camera trapping techniques of capture-recapture sampling as the foundation