🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Climate change can shift the balance between grassland, savanna, shrubland, and forest, transforming the habitat templates that different cats require. This overview surveys how projected biome shifts…

Bobcats living in fragmented urban edges, such as those around Los Angeles, illustrate how roads and development structure carnivore populations even for adaptable mesopredators. This overview surveys…

Bobcats are a generalist felid whose northern range limit appears constrained by deep snow and severe winters, conditions that warming is relaxing. This overview surveys evidence and projections for b…

Bobcats in fire-prone chaparral and shrubland of the western United States face landscapes shaped by both wildfire and urban development. This overview surveys how bobcats respond to fire through move…

Canada lynx depend on boreal and montane conifer forest, a biome projected to shift northward and upslope as climate warms. This overview surveys how vegetation models and downscaled climate projectio…

Across much of the jaguar's range, cattle ranching both fragments habitat and fuels retaliatory killing when jaguars prey on livestock, a conflict that climate and land-use change can intensify. This…

The Pantanal wetland supports one of the densest known jaguar populations, and its future hinges on the flood-drought cycle that climate change is disrupting. This overview surveys how altered rainfal…

Snow cover shapes how snow leopards stalk prey, move across terrain, and den, so shifts in the timing, depth, and persistence of snow under warming can alter their ecology. This overview surveys how r…

Circuit theory, which models animal movement as electrical current flowing across a resistance surface, has become a standard tool for mapping connectivity for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys…

As suitable conditions shift, species need corridors that connect where they live now to where they will need to live, a concept sometimes called climate connectivity. This overview surveys methods fo…

Snow leopard persistence is tightly coupled to wild ungulate prey such as blue sheep (bharal), Himalayan ibex, and argali, whose forage and distribution shift with warming. This overview surveys how a…

The Sundarbans support both tigers and dense human populations dependent on the forest for fishing, honey collection, and wood, a coexistence stressed by climate change. This overview surveys how habi…

Climate refugia, places relatively buffered from climate change where species can persist, are an increasingly central organizing idea in conservation planning. This overview surveys the typology of r…

Climate velocity measures how fast and in what direction conditions are shifting across a landscape, indicating the speed at which species must move to keep pace. This overview surveys how climate vel…

European rabbit dynamics in Iberia are governed by an interaction of climate, vegetation, and disease, all of which bear on Iberian lynx survival. This overview surveys how temperature and rainfall in…

Climate change can expand the range of pathogens, parasites, and disease vectors, with potential consequences for wild cat health. This overview surveys how warming may alter the distribution of tick-…

Clouded leopards are forest-dependent cats of Southeast Asia and the Himalayan foothills whose arboreal habits tie them closely to intact forest. This overview surveys their distribution, sensitivity…

Measuring whether a conservation intervention actually helped requires comparing outcomes against a credible counterfactual of what would have happened otherwise. This overview surveys quasi-experimen…

The most realistic forecasts of cat futures combine climate change with land-use change, since for many forest cats habitat conversion is the faster, larger threat. This overview surveys how integrate…

Cats rarely face climate change in isolation; it interacts with habitat loss, fragmentation, hunting, disease, and conflict to produce cumulative impacts greater than any single threat. This overview…

A core prediction of climate change is that mountain species will shift upslope, and detecting such shifts in elusive cats is a methodological challenge. This overview surveys the evidence and approac…

Drought reverberates through ecosystems by reducing vegetation, prey body condition, and reproduction, with cascading effects on the predators that depend on them. This overview surveys how droughts o…

In western North America, puma populations track deer and other ungulate prey whose abundance and condition fluctuate with drought. This overview surveys how dry years reduce forage, lower prey recrui…

African lions inhabit savannas where drought and water availability strongly shape prey abundance and distribution, making them sensitive to climate variability. This overview surveys how droughts red…

Drought intensifies competition between people and predators for scarce water, forage, and livestock, often heightening human-wildlife conflict. This overview surveys how dry periods push cats toward…

With lowland forest largely converted, Sumatran tigers increasingly persist in hill and montane forest, raising questions about how warming will reshape these upland habitats. This overview surveys ho…

Detecting climate-driven range shifts in snow leopards requires repeated, standardized occupancy surveys across elevation gradients. This overview surveys how camera-trap arrays and occupancy modeling…

Beyond gradual trends, extreme events, severe droughts, heatwaves, floods, and harsh winters, can cause abrupt declines in cat populations or their prey. This overview surveys documented cases where e…

Research in Australia has shown that feral cats exploit recently burned landscapes, where loss of vegetation cover leaves native prey exposed and easier to catch, compounding the impacts of fire. This…

The wildland-urban interface, where development meets wildland vegetation, is expanding and is the zone where climate-driven fire most directly intersects with cat populations like urban-edge pumas an…