Research overview: population viability analysis under climate scenarios for cats

Population viability analysis estimates extinction risk by simulating a population's demography forward in time, and it is increasingly run under climate scenarios for threatened cats. This overview surveys how PVA incorporates climate effects on survival, reproduction, carrying capacity, and connectivity, drawing on examples like the Iberian lynx where climate-coupled PVA reshaped strategy. It reviews the data demands and the cascading uncertainties of projecting demography decades ahead. The synthesis frames climate-coupled viability analysis as the tool that translates habitat and prey projections into extinction-risk estimates, explaining why it sits at the end of the modeling chain, integrating climate, habitat, and population biology into the bottom-line question of whether a cat population is likely to persist.