🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

eMammal is a citizen-science platform and data pipeline in which trained volunteers run camera traps and submit images that experts verify before archiving in a standardized, permanent repository suit…

A persistent problem in camera-trap density estimation is that animals near the edge of a camera array spend only part of their range within it, so naive abundance divided by the array area overestima…

Wildlife photographers and researchers sometimes bait or lure cats to cameras to obtain images or detections, a practice that sits at the intersection of effectiveness and ethics. This overview survey…

Although non-invasive compared with handling or collaring, camera trapping raises ethical considerations around animal welfare, disturbance, and responsible practice. This overview surveys the welfare…

Standard occupancy models assume that detections are never mistaken, but in practice species can be misidentified, a particular risk when automated classifiers or volunteers confuse similar-looking ca…

The practical success of a camera-trap study often hinges on unglamorous logistics, keeping cameras powered, with adequate storage, and functioning through long deployments in harsh conditions. This o…

The fishing cat is a wetland-dependent felid of South and Southeast Asia, adapted to hunting in marshes, mangroves, and along waterways, and camera traps are central to monitoring its scattered, decli…

The flat-headed cat is a highly specialized, semi-aquatic small felid of Southeast Asian peat-swamp and riverine forests, and one of the most threatened and poorly known cats in the world. This overvi…

Animals differ in how likely they are to be photographed, due to home-range placement, behavior, sex, age, or trail use, and this heterogeneity in capture probability, if unmodeled, biases abundance e…

Camera traps inevitably photograph people, hikers, hunters, herders, poachers, and local residents, creating a sensitive byproduct that raises privacy, legal, and ethical questions. This overview surv…

Jaguars are monitored across the Americas through camera-trap capture-recapture, and coordinated initiatives increasingly link local surveys into range-wide networks producing comparable density estim…

Leopards are among the most frequently camera-trapped big cats, their rosette patterns enabling robust individual identification across an enormous range spanning Africa and Asia. This overview survey…

Camera traps frequently fire without an animal present, triggered by moving vegetation, heat shimmer, rain, or sunlight, producing empty frames that can dominate a deployment and overwhelm reviewers.…

Camera-trap surveys aimed at tigers and leopards routinely capture a hidden bycatch of small Asian cats, marbled cat, leopard cat, golden cat, jungle cat, and others, providing rare records of poorly…

Some felid populations contain a mix of individually identifiable and unidentifiable animals, for example when only some individuals bear distinctive scars, collars, or clear coat patterns. This overv…

Community occupancy models extend single-species occupancy to many species simultaneously, sharing information across the assemblage to improve estimates for rarely detected species and to characteriz…

Most modern camera traps fire when a passive infrared sensor detects a moving heat signature, the contrast between a warm animal and its cooler background. This overview explains how PIR sensors work,…

Designing a camera-trap study to reliably answer its question requires anticipating whether the planned effort will yield enough data for adequate statistical power, the ability to detect a real effec…

Relative abundance indices, typically detections per unit effort such as photos per 100 trap-nights, are the simplest and most widely used camera-trap metrics, but their reliability is hotly debated.…

The rusty-spotted cat, one of the world's smallest felids, inhabits forests and scrub of India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, and is so tiny and secretive that camera traps provide many of the few confirmed r…

Trap-nights, the number of cameras multiplied by the days each is active, are the basic currency of camera-trap survey effort, and this overview examines how effort governs what a study can reveal. It…

Wild cats communicate through scent-marking, spraying, scraping, cheek-rubbing, and clawing, leaving signals at conspicuous sites that they revisit, behavior that camera traps are uniquely positioned…

In many felids, males range more widely and are detected differently than females, and ignoring these differences biases spatially explicit capture-recapture density estimates. This overview surveys h…

Snow leopards inhabit some of the most remote, rugged, high-altitude terrain on Earth, making camera trapping one of the few feasible ways to estimate their numbers. This overview surveys the methods…

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interacti…

Building on spatially explicit capture-recapture, spatial mark-resight and unmarked SECR methods estimate density when few or no animals can be individually identified, exploiting the spatial pattern…

Different cat species carry different natural marks, tiger stripes, leopard and jaguar rosettes, ocelot chains, cheetah spots, and pattern-matching software exploits these to identify individuals semi…

Camera traps stamp each photograph with a time, turning deployments into records of when species are active. This overview explains how researchers use these timestamps to estimate daily activity patt…

The Random Encounter Model estimates animal density for species that cannot be individually identified by relating the rate at which they trigger cameras to their density, using the physics of random…

The Royle-Nichols model leverages a simple insight: sites holding more individuals are more likely to produce a detection, so variation in detection across sites encodes information about local abunda…