Adaptable neighbours: GPS-collared leopard movement in human-dominated India

By fitting GPS collars to leopards living among farms and villages in western Maharashtra, this study quantified how big cats navigate a landscape saturated with people. Collared leopards were strongly nocturnal, resting by day in sugarcane and other tall crops and moving through inhabited areas after dark with home ranges far smaller than those in wild reserves. The animals tolerated remarkable proximity to humans yet avoided direct encounters through fine-scale temporal partitioning. The findings demonstrated behavioural plasticity as the mechanism enabling large-carnivore persistence in agricultural mosaics, and informed conflict mitigation by clarifying when and where leopards use shared space, a template later applied to leopard ecology around Mumbai.