Research overview: spatial and temporal avoidance among sympatric felids

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interactions. This overview surveys how researchers use co-occurrence occupancy models, activity-overlap analysis, and spatial detection patterns to test for avoidance, partitioning, or coexistence among species such as jaguars, pumas, and ocelots, or tigers, leopards, and smaller Asian cats. It discusses the challenge of distinguishing genuine avoidance from independent habitat preferences, the role of prey and habitat in mediating coexistence, and how intraguild dynamics shape community structure. The overview highlights camera trapping as the leading tool for studying carnivore coexistence at landscape scale, revealing how cats share, or divide, the same environments across space and time.