🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Studying how fire affects cats requires methods to map burns, track animal responses, and disentangle fire from other drivers. This overview surveys the toolkit, satellite burn-severity mapping, GPS t…

Climate is intensifying disturbance in boreal and montane forests through larger wildfires and bark-beetle outbreaks, reshaping the dense conifer stands and snow conditions Canada lynx and snowshoe ha…

Climate change can alter fire regimes, frequency, intensity, seasonality, and extent, pushing ecosystems toward new states that differ from historical conditions. This overview surveys how shifting fi…

The fishing cat is a wetland-dependent felid of South and Southeast Asia, reliant on marshes, mangroves, and waterways that are among the habitats most exposed to climate change and human conversion.…

As Sumatra's forests are carved into smaller blocks, maintaining connectivity among tiger populations becomes vital. This overview surveys how fragmentation isolates tiger subpopulations, the role of…

Existing protected-area networks were largely designed around present-day distributions and may not cover where species will need to be as the climate changes. This overview surveys gap analyses that…

Having passed through a severe bottleneck, the Iberian lynx carries reduced genetic diversity, which compounds its vulnerability to climate and disease stress. This overview surveys how genetic monito…

The mountains of High Asia store water as snow and ice, and accelerating glacial retreat reshapes downstream hydrology that supports the meadows and prey of snow leopards. This overview surveys how ch…

An overview of the ecological mechanism by which warming pushes the alpine treeline upslope and squeezes the open, rocky terrain snow leopards use. As shrubs and forest advance into former alpine mead…

Small, isolated cat populations risk inbreeding depression, and genetic rescue, introducing individuals from other populations, has been used to counter it. This overview surveys the concept and its f…

Roads, railways, dams, and energy infrastructure are expanding rapidly through tropical and montane cat habitat, fragmenting landscapes and opening forests to settlement and hunting. This overview sur…

The Sundarbans lie in a cyclone-prone delta where climate change may intensify storms and surge, with consequences for tigers, prey, and people. This overview surveys how major cyclones reshape the fo…

Lynx populations in the contiguous United States, in the Rockies, Cascades, Great Lakes region, and New England, sit at the warm, dry edge of the species' range and are unusually exposed to climate-dr…

Jaguar populations historically formed a largely connected continental network, but deforestation and barriers are increasingly structuring their genetics. This overview surveys what molecular studies…

At the northern edge of its range in Mexico and the southwestern United States, the jaguar occupies arid borderlands where climate, water availability, and human infrastructure shape persistence. This…

Understanding how jaguars use human-modified landscapes is key to predicting their response to land-use and climate change. This overview surveys GPS-telemetry and resource-selection research showing…

Projecting future habitat for cats requires anticipating not just climate but human land-use change, which is modeled with scenario-based simulation tools. This overview surveys approaches that foreca…

Quantifying how habitat is broken apart requires landscape metrics that capture patch size, edge, isolation, and configuration. This overview surveys the metrics commonly applied to cat habitat, from…

Landscape genetics links genetic patterns to the features of the terrain between populations, a toolkit central to studying fragmentation in cats. This overview surveys the methods, from microsatellit…

Detecting how cats respond to climate and habitat change requires monitoring at scales that camera-trap networks increasingly provide. This overview surveys how coordinated camera-trap arrays generate…

The leopard is among the most adaptable big cats, occupying habitats from rainforest to desert to urban edges, yet it has still lost much of its historical range to habitat loss and conflict. This ove…

If suitable climate space for Canada lynx moves northward, populations can only follow it through connected habitat, making latitudinal corridors a conservation priority. This overview surveys how con…

Most felid distribution models are correlative, fitting statistical relationships between occurrence and environment, but mechanistic models built from physiology and energetics offer a complementary…

Climate change is driving larger, more intense wildfires in many regions, and the extreme fire seasons in Australia, California, and elsewhere have reshaped how ecologists study fire and wildlife. Thi…

Iberian lynx recovery has relied on metapopulation thinking, managing a set of connected subpopulations to spread risk and sustain gene flow. This overview surveys how population viability analyses in…

Projecting a species into the future requires transferring a model into climate conditions that may not exist anywhere today, raising the risk of unreliable extrapolation. This overview surveys the pr…

As parts of the Sundarbans are projected to be lost to the sea, researchers ask which areas might persist as climate refugia and whether tigers could relocate within or beyond the delta. This overview…

Tracking whether Iberian lynx recovery is keeping pace with environmental change requires sustained, standardized monitoring of cats, rabbits, and habitat. This overview surveys the census methods, ca…

Effective population size, the genetically relevant number of breeders, is a key indicator of a fragmented population's resilience. This overview surveys how researchers estimate it for cats from noni…

Climate-adaptation strategies, refugia protection, corridors, assisted colonization, need monitoring to know whether they work over the long timescales of climate change. This overview surveys the ind…