Research overview: ecology-based coexistence and big-cat conservation

Conserving big cats in a human-dominated world depends on applying their ecology to the challenge of coexistence. This overview synthesizes how understanding prey requirements, ranging, dispersal, and conflict informs conservation strategies, including protecting prey-rich cores, maintaining corridors for dispersal, reducing livestock depredation, and fostering human tolerance. It reviews how the wide-ranging, prey-dependent nature of big cats makes connectivity and prey conservation central, and how community-based approaches address the conflict that arises where cats and people overlap. The synthesis frames effective conservation as the practical application of ecological knowledge to coexistence. For enthusiasts it draws together the recurring themes of big-cat ecology, prey, space, dispersal, and conflict, into a conservation perspective, explaining why saving lions, tigers, leopards, and their relatives requires managing whole landscapes and the human communities within them rather than protected areas alone.