Research overview: oil palm landscapes and wild cats of Southeast Asia

Beyond tigers, Southeast Asia's oil palm expansion affects a guild of smaller cats, including leopard cat, clouded leopard, marbled cat, and flat-headed cat, with widely varying tolerance of plantations. This overview surveys how these species respond to forest conversion, which can persist in modified mosaics and which require intact forest, and how plantation structure, prey, and disturbance shape their occurrence. It reviews camera-trap research documenting the cat community across land-use gradients. The synthesis frames the felid response to oil palm as a spectrum from adaptable generalists to forest-dependent specialists, illustrating that land-use change reshuffles whole cat communities rather than simply removing one flagship species.