🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Tobler and colleagues assessed how effectively camera traps inventory the terrestrial mammal community of a Peruvian rainforest, quantifying sampling effort needed to detect species and how detection…

Mathias W. Tobler, Samia E. Carrillo-Percastegui, Renata Leite Pitman, Rosa Mares, George Powell · Animal Conservation · 2008

Wang and Macdonald applied camera-trap capture-recapture to tigers and leopards in the high-altitude mountains of Bhutan, documenting the surprising presence of tigers at unusually high elevations and…

Sherub Wang, David W. Macdonald · Biological Conservation · 2009

Rowcliffe and colleagues introduced the Random Encounter Model, a method to estimate density for species that cannot be individually identified, such as unmarked cats and many prey species. Borrowing…

J. Marcus Rowcliffe, Juliet Field, Samuel T. Turvey, Chris Carbone · Journal of Applied Ecology · 2008

Reppucci, Gardner, and Lucherini tackled one of the hardest felid monitoring problems: estimating density of the rare, cryptic Andean cat in the high Andes, where it coexists with the more common pamp…

Juan I. Reppucci, Beth Gardner, Mauro Lucherini · Journal of Mammalogy · 2011

Efford and Fewster clarified how spatially explicit capture-recapture can estimate the number of individuals within a defined region, bridging the gap between density (animals per unit area) and absol…

Murray G. Efford, Rachel M. Fewster · Oikos · 2013

Kelly and colleagues estimated puma densities at multiple Latin American sites using camera-trap capture-recapture, confronting the challenge that pumas, unlike jaguars, have relatively uniform coats…

Marcella J. Kelly, Andrew J. Noss, Marcelo S. Di Bitetti, Leonardo Maffei, Rosario L. Arispe, et al. · Journal of Mammalogy · 2008

Trolle and Kery produced one of the early rigorous density estimates for ocelots, applying closed-population capture-recapture to camera-trap data from the Brazilian Pantanal. Ocelots are well suited…

Mogens Trolle, Marc Kery · Journal of Mammalogy · 2003

The Andean cat is one of the world's rarest and least-known felids, a small cat of the high Andes and Patagonian steppe whose study depends heavily on camera traps. This overview surveys the difficult…

Beyond scientific monitoring, dedicated wildlife photographers build custom DSLR camera-trap rigs to capture high-resolution, artfully lit images of elusive cats in their natural environment. This ove…

Snapshot Safari and Snapshot USA are large collaborative camera-trap networks that aggregate standardized surveys across many sites, in African reserves and across the United States respectively, to s…

Researchers sometimes attract animals to cameras using food bait, scent lures, visual attractants, or scratching posts to increase detection rates and obtain better-posed, identifiable images. This ov…

Camera traps are intended to observe wildlife unobtrusively, but white flashes, audible shutter or focus sounds, and infrared glow can be detected by animals and alter their behavior, raising both dat…

Bobcats and Canada lynx are widespread North American felids studied extensively with camera traps, though their relatively subtle coat patterns complicate reliable individual identification. This ove…

Camera-trap distance sampling adapts classical distance-sampling theory to estimate density of unmarked animals from the distances at which they are detected within the camera's field of view. This ov…

Identifying individual cats from their unique stripe, spot, or rosette patterns is the cornerstone of capture-recapture, and software increasingly assists this once wholly manual task. This overview s…

Emerging deep-learning methods aim to automate not just species classification but individual identification, re-identifying specific cats from their coat patterns to build capture histories for captu…

Wild cats span a spectrum of daily activity, from strongly nocturnal to crepuscular, diurnal, or flexibly cathemeral, and camera-trap timestamps are the primary tool for documenting these patterns at…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Negroes and colleagues estimated puma density in the central Brazilian Cerrado using camera traps, confronting the difficulty of individually identifying pumas from their relatively unmarked coats by…

Nuno Negroes, Peter Sarmento, Joao Cruz, Catarina Eira, Erica Revilla, et al. · Journal of Wildlife Management · 2010