Fig. 3: Trend lines for cumulative forest loss in tiger reserves that exhibited significantly higher than anticipated deforestation.

All reserves displayed here exhibited significant results (unadjusted P < 0.05) based on a two-sided Fisher’s exact test to compare the ratios of pre-intervention and post-intervention mean squared prediction errors between placebo and treated units (see Methods for details). Note the observed deforestation values were higher than the synthetic counterfactual in the case of these reserves, suggesting higher than anticipated forest loss. Significance levels (unadjusted P values) were reported for each synthetic counterfactual in the displayed plots. The dotted pink line represents the cumulative forest loss for the synthetic control model, whereas the dotted grey line represents observed deforestation in hectares. The vertical dashed line represents the year of implementation of the enhanced conservation policy. For each of these reserves, the synthetic control line closely tracks the observed cumulative forest loss values before the intervention.