Research overview: extreme climate events and felid population crashes

Beyond gradual trends, extreme events, severe droughts, heatwaves, floods, and harsh winters, can cause abrupt declines in cat populations or their prey. This overview surveys documented cases where extreme weather drove prey die-offs and predator declines, the mechanisms involved, and the difficulty of predicting and detecting such episodic impacts. It reviews how increasing frequency of extremes under climate change may matter more than mean shifts for some populations. The synthesis frames extreme events as a distinct and growing climate threat, explaining why population viability assessments increasingly incorporate catastrophic-event risk, and why a single bad year can reset a cat population more than a decade of gradual warming, especially for small or isolated groups.