Research overview: climate effects on snow leopard prey (blue sheep and ibex)

Snow leopard persistence is tightly coupled to wild ungulate prey such as blue sheep (bharal), Himalayan ibex, and argali, whose forage and distribution shift with warming. This overview surveys how altered growing seasons, shrub encroachment into alpine grassland, and changing snow regimes affect prey body condition, recruitment, and elevational range, and how those changes cascade to predator density. It also covers competition with livestock for high pasture as herders move animals upslope. The synthesis explains why predator-focused climate projections increasingly couple cat habitat models to prey models, and why monitoring ungulate populations is treated as an early-warning signal for snow leopard range dynamics.