Research overview: remote sensing for felid habitat change monitoring

Satellite remote sensing is the backbone of measuring habitat change across the vast ranges of wild cats. This overview surveys the data and methods, optical imagery for land-cover classification, radar for forest structure, vegetation indices for productivity, and time-series change detection, used to track deforestation, degradation, and land conversion in felid habitat. It reviews freely available archives like Landsat and Sentinel and cloud platforms that put global analysis within reach. The synthesis frames remote sensing as the indispensable tool that turns sprawling, inaccessible cat ranges into quantifiable, monitorable landscapes, explaining how researchers detect where tiger forest is falling or jaguar corridors are narrowing without surveying every hectare on the ground.