Research overview: climate-driven range shifts for snow leopards

Snow leopards occupy cold, high-elevation habitat that climate change threatens to shrink and fragment, and this overview examines how movement and distribution research informs projections of their future range. Warming may allow treeline and agriculture to advance upslope, compressing alpine habitat into smaller, more isolated patches and potentially severing the corridors that connect populations. The overview discusses how understanding current movement and habitat selection underpins models of where suitable conditions will persist and how cats might track shifting habitat upward. It also covers the limits of such projections and the role of conserving elevational connectivity and climate refugia. For a montane specialist, the capacity to move to newly suitable areas, and the availability of routes to reach them, may determine long-term persistence. Movement science is integral to climate-adaptation planning for snow leopards.