Big cats in our backyards: leopards persisting in a human-dominated Indian landscape

This influential study documented free-ranging leopards living at high density in the densely populated, intensively cultivated countryside of Maharashtra, India, far from any protected forest. Using camera traps and questionnaire surveys, the authors showed that leopards and striped hyenas persisted amid sugarcane fields and villages with very few people present, subsisting largely on domestic dogs, livestock and feral pigs rather than wild prey. The work overturned the assumption that large carnivores require wilderness, reframing human-dominated agricultural mosaics as functional carnivore habitat. It argued that conflict management, not habitat exclusion, is the central challenge of coexistence, and it became a cornerstone reference for understanding leopards around Mumbai and across South Asia.