A fresh count conducted by an international team has found nearly 14,600 orangutans in the Sumatran wild, making the number around 8,000 more than previously estimated. The study carrying the good news about booming orangutan population has been published in journal Science Advances.

The sad thing is that the study has been titled ‘Land-cover changes predict steep declines for the Sumatran orangutan’, thus there is significant downside to the rise.

The researchers said the augmented orangutans’ prediction wasn’t due to some rare population boom. Instead they mentioned that the increase has been noted because of their having taken a more detailed count as compared to the ones done earlier.

For instance, the team discovered orangutans living at heights, which were previously thought to be quite high, as a result of which nobody looked for them there. Furthermore, they get to know that orangutans were more broadly distributed in logging areas than they thought. And, then they ultimately found that the great apes turned up in the areas that simply left unexplored in earlier counts.

There were animals all along, however, the scientists said that now they were no less safe as a species.

With the help of current land-use plans as the basis for computer models, the researchers have predicted a loss of roughly 4,500 individuals of the species by 2030. The models projected orangutan populations opposite to future deforestation scenarios.

In a statement, study lead author Serge Wich, of Liverpool John Moores University, said, “It was very exciting to determine that there are more Sumatran orangutans than thought, but this doesn’t mean that we can be complacent. Numerous development projects are planned in the area that, if they aren’t stopped, could sharply reduce number of orangutans over coming years”.