Research overview: detecting elevational range shifts in mountain cats

A core prediction of climate change is that mountain species will shift upslope, and detecting such shifts in elusive cats is a methodological challenge. This overview surveys the evidence and approaches for documenting elevational range shifts in felids and their prey, including resurveys of historical sites, occupancy modeling across elevation, and inference from prey distributions. It reviews the long time series and careful design needed to distinguish real shifts from sampling noise. The synthesis frames elevational shift detection as the empirical test of climate predictions for mountain cats like snow leopards, explaining why robust evidence remains scarce, and why confirming the upslope movement that models forecast requires monitoring infrastructure that many remote mountain ranges still lack.