A group of volunteers have been recruited to help clean up Siberian tigers' habitats in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

Sixty volunteers have been selected from 300 applicants across the nation to clear traps set by poachers.

The volunteers range in age from 19 to 65 and come from all walks of life, including public servants, university students, teachers, journalists, doctors and entrepreneurs, according to Wang Lin, head of the project, which begins on Friday and is expected to last a week.

Xie Yan, director of the China program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said the volunteers will be accompanied by wildlife experts, local guides and security teams.

The WCS, a non-profit organization based in New York, has co-sponsored the trap-clearing campaign with the Heilongjiang Provincial Administration of Forest Industry, the Harbin Daily Newspaper Group and the local news portal www.harbinnews.com.

The participants are to be divided into four teams, which will be deployed to clear traps in the tigers' habitats along the Wandashan and Changbai mountains, Xie told China Daily on Monday.

Poachers turned to using iron wire to make traps for the tigers since the buying and selling of firearms was banned by the central government in 1996, said Jia Jingbo, dean of the College of Wildlife Resources, Northeast Forestry University.

"Most of the traps in the forested area of Heilongjiang were set up to catch wild boar, deer and other animals that Siberian tigers eat," Xie said.

So clearing the traps will not only enable the tigers to maintain a stable food supply, but also help protect this endangered species. The temperature in Heilongjiang usually drops below -10 C in January, so it will be challenging work for the volunteers to stay outdoors for hours at a time.

But their work is necessary, Jia said, because no other manpower is available for the work due to a shortage of government funds.

Zhang Yongming, a 65-year-old retired forestry official in Heilongjiang, is the oldest volunteer to be recruited for the project.

"While we accept that we will not be able to clear all the traps in such a short space of time, we can help people realize the importance of protecting Siberian tigers by increasing public awareness," he said.

Statistics from the World Wide Fund for Nature show there are only 3,200 wild tigers left in the world, of which 400 to 500 are wild Siberian tigers, whereas there were 100,000 a century ago.

According to zoologists, China is estimated to have 20 wild Siberian tigers, among which eight to 10 inhabit Jilin province, while 10 to 14 are in Heilongjiang.

In November 2010, leaders from 13 countries where tigers live, including Premier Wen Jiabao, pledged to double the world's wild tiger population by 2022 at the International Tiger Forum in St Petersburg.