Research overview: snow leopard GPS home ranges far exceed early VHF estimates

When GPS collars replaced VHF on snow leopards, they revealed home ranges dramatically larger than earlier studies had suggested, and this overview examines why. VHF tracking in such rugged, remote terrain yielded sparse fixes that undersampled the full extent of movement, systematically underestimating range size. GPS collars, logging frequent positions automatically, showed individual snow leopards using areas of hundreds of square kilometers, far larger than the tens of square kilometers some early work implied. The overview discusses how this revision reshaped understanding of snow leopard density, the area required for conservation, and the apparent rarity of the species, which partly reflects vast individual ranges rather than absolute scarcity everywhere. The correction underscores how technology and estimation methods, particularly accounting for autocorrelation, fundamentally shape conclusions about felid space use.