Research overview: nomadism versus residency in snow leopards

Whether snow leopards maintain stable home ranges or wander nomadically is a genuine and consequential question, and this overview examines the evidence telemetry has brought to bear. Resident adults appear to hold large, somewhat stable ranges, but subadults and some individuals show extensive, directional movements more consistent with dispersal or nomadism, blurring the categories. The overview discusses how variogram and net-squared-displacement diagnostics help classify movement strategy and warn against fitting home ranges to non-resident animals. The distinction matters for estimating density, since nomads and residents must be counted differently, and for conservation, since highly mobile individuals link populations but are hard to protect. Resolving the residency-nomadism question for snow leopards is central to interpreting their spatial ecology across a sparse, vast, mountainous range.