🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Whether species can evolve or behaviorally adjust their climate niche fast enough to keep pace with change is central to predicting their fate. This overview surveys the concept of niche conservatism,…

Sumatra has lost vast areas of lowland rainforest to oil palm and pulpwood plantations, the principal driver of Sumatran tiger habitat loss. This overview surveys how plantation expansion clears and f…

Beyond tigers, Southeast Asia's oil palm expansion affects a guild of smaller cats, including leopard cat, clouded leopard, marbled cat, and flat-headed cat, with widely varying tolerance of plantatio…

Much of Sumatra's lowland forest grows on carbon-rich peat that, when drained for plantations, becomes highly flammable, fueling the recurrent fire and haze crises that also degrade tiger habitat. Thi…

Climate change is shifting the timing of biological events, and while phenology is best studied in plants and birds, it bears on cats through their prey and reproductive timing. This overview surveys…

Population viability analysis estimates extinction risk by simulating a population's demography forward in time, and it is increasingly run under climate scenarios for threatened cats. This overview s…

After fire, vegetation regrows through successional stages that determine when and how prey and predators return. This overview surveys how post-fire recovery shapes habitat quality for cats, the flus…

Managers use prescribed fire to shape vegetation, reduce fuel loads, and create habitat conditions that benefit wildlife, including the prey of cats. This overview surveys how planned burning maintain…

Even where forest remains standing, jaguars can decline if their prey is hunted out, a phenomenon known as empty forest or defaunation that interacts with habitat and climate change. This overview sur…

Sundarbans tigers rely on prey such as spotted deer (chital) and wild boar, whose abundance depends on mangrove forest condition and freshwater availability. This overview surveys how climate-driven c…

How flexibly a cat can switch prey when its preferred species declines shapes its resilience to drought and habitat change. This overview surveys evidence on dietary breadth across felids, from specia…

As suitable habitat contracts to higher, cooler refugia, the corridors linking snow leopard populations become critical for gene flow and recolonization. This overview surveys the methods researchers…

Protected areas are the cornerstone of felid conservation, but their effectiveness at stopping habitat loss varies and is tested by mounting land-use and climate pressure. This overview surveys method…

Protecting continuous elevation gradients lets species shift upslope as climate warms while staying within protected habitat, a recurring strategy for montane regions. This overview surveys the ration…

Pumas were extirpated from much of eastern North America but persist and expand in the west, prompting study of where suitable habitat exists and how the species might recolonize. This overview survey…

Pumas in fire-prone California navigate landscapes repeatedly shaped by wildfire, and tracking studies examine how they respond to burns. This overview surveys research on how pumas move during and af…

The Iberian lynx is a hyperspecialist on European rabbit, so rabbit population crashes from rabbit hemorrhagic disease (RHDV, including the RHDV2 variant) and myxomatosis directly threaten the cat. Th…

Beyond the Sundarbans, tigers across Asia face varied climate exposure layered onto severe habitat loss, prompting range-wide vulnerability thinking. This overview surveys how climate projections, sea…

Satellite remote sensing is the backbone of measuring habitat change across the vast ranges of wild cats. This overview surveys the data and methods, optical imagery for land-cover classification, rad…

Beyond outright inundation, sea-level rise and reduced freshwater flow are increasing salinity in the Sundarbans, shifting mangrove species composition and forest productivity that underpin tiger habi…

Roads affect cats through direct mortality and through the barrier effect that fragments populations, a central theme in carnivore conservation. This overview surveys research quantifying how highways…

Vehicle collisions are a leading cause of Iberian lynx death and a major barrier to the connectivity that climate-adaptive recovery depends on. This overview surveys how road networks fragment lynx ha…

Wildlife occurrence data for cats are often opportunistically collected, biased toward roads, reserves, and accessible terrain, which can distort distribution models if uncorrected. This overview surv…

Several boreal mammals, notably snowshoe hare, molt between brown summer and white winter coats on a fixed photoperiod schedule, and shrinking snow duration creates a camouflage mismatch when white an…

Across Sumatra, widespread snaring depletes both tigers and their prey, hollowing out forests that still appear intact on satellite imagery. This overview surveys how indiscriminate wire snares set fo…

This survey reviews how snow leopard species distribution models are run across contrasting greenhouse-gas emissions pathways to bracket the range of plausible future habitat. It explains how downscal…

Snow leopards occur at naturally low density across a patchy, mountainous range, so climate-driven habitat fragmentation poses a real risk to gene flow. This overview surveys what noninvasive genetic…

The arid mountains of Mongolia and the Gobi support an important snow leopard population at the dry edge of the species' climate envelope. This overview surveys how warming and changing precipitation…

A central theme in northern felid climate research is that the dividing line between Canada lynx and bobcat tracks snow conditions. This overview surveys the morphological and ecological basis for tha…

Canada lynx populations track the famous boom-bust cycle of snowshoe hare, so anything that alters hare dynamics propagates to the predator. This overview surveys how climate change may affect the har…