A century ago, 100,000 tigers roamed the continent of Asia. Today, that number has dwindled to less than 40,000.

The new method to step up conservation efforts is to modify the current method of taxonomy .A method which, according to Science Advances, has made conservation efforts unnecessarily difficult.

There up to nine commonly accepted subspecies of tigers of which three are extinct. However, the analysis that has been conducted reveals only two subspecies.

The first are those found on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali and the other in continental Asia.

The study has seen mitochondrial DNA, skulls, skin markings, habitat and prey from all nine subspecies and found a large rate of overlapping traits between those tigers found in continental Asia and the Sunda tigers (those found in the islands).

The hope is that the simplification of taxonomy would give conservationists flexibility in preserving tigers as the study reinforces that they are perhaps the least diverse in the big cat family.

However, this approach is being challenged on grounds of a? taxonomic inflation? or the massive flow of newly recognized species and subspecies.

Conservation efforts on a global scale have been enforced to double the number of tigers by 2022.Nearly $ 50 million is annually spent to preserve the tiger. This has yielded some success like the 30% increase since 2010 (according to National Tiger Conservation Authority   of India) as well as the Amur Tiger in Russia whose numbers have risen from 502 to 540 within a decade (according to the World Wildlife Fund).

However, according to the World Wildlife Fund, many tigers remain under threat from poachers, climate change and habitat loss.

While new methods of taxonomy may go a long way in simplifying conservation efforts, the real change can only come into place when this modified version is used .Hopefully, these efforts will yield rich dividends which will continue for years to come.