Research overview: vegetation productivity, NDVI, and felid prey forecasting

Satellite indices of vegetation productivity such as NDVI track the green forage that drives herbivore abundance, offering a remote way to anticipate prey conditions for predators. This overview surveys how productivity metrics are used to model prey distribution and abundance, link drought and rainfall to forage, and forecast predator carrying capacity across cat ranges from savannas to steppes. It reviews how productivity data feed into distribution and population models. The synthesis frames vegetation productivity as a bridge between climate and predators, explaining how monitoring greenness from space lets researchers anticipate the bottom-up effects of drought and climate variability on the prey base, and thereby on the cats that depend on it.