🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This high-profile study coupled climate, prey, and disease dynamics with metapopulation modeling to project the fate of the critically endangered Iberian lynx. It found that standard reintroduction pl…

Fordham, D.A., Akcakaya, H.R., Araujo, M.B., Keith, D.A., Brook, B.W. · Nature Climate Change · 2013

This study linked landscape genetics to climate projections for Canada lynx, asking how warming-driven habitat contraction would affect genetic diversity along the species' southern, trailing range ed…

Koen, E.L., Bowman, J., Murray, D.L., Wilson, P.J. · Ecography · 2014

This paper argued that projections of species distributions under climate change carry large uncertainty arising from the choice of model, climate scenario, and other factors, and that ensemble foreca…

Araujo, M.B., New, M. · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2007

This study tested whether competition between Canada lynx and bobcat structures their distributions at a continental scale, with implications for how warming snowpack reshuffles the two species. Lynx…

Peers, M.J.L., Thornton, D.H., Murray, D.L. · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2013

Working at the southern edge of the Canada lynx range, this study disentangled whether the amount of suitable habitat or its spatial fragmentation better explains where lynx persist. Using occurrence…

Hornseth, M.L., Walpole, A.A., Walton, L.R., Bowman, J., Ray, J.C., Fortin, M.-J., Murray, D.L. · PLoS ONE · 2014

This influential modeling study examined Canada lynx and American marten at the southern edge of their range in the northern Appalachians, asking how climate warming, forest conversion, and trapping p…

Carroll, C. · Conservation Biology · 2007

The Eurasian lynx, a larger relative of the Canada lynx, occupies forests across Europe and Asia where its future is shaped by both climate and intensive land use. This overview surveys how habitat-su…

The Iberian lynx inhabits Mediterranean scrub and dehesa woodland in a region projected to become hotter and drier. This overview surveys how aridification, increased fire frequency, and shifting vege…

Because climate is shifting where suitable Iberian lynx habitat will lie, conservationists have debated assisted colonization, deliberately establishing populations in areas projected to become suitab…

When species cannot track shifting climate fast enough, assisted migration, deliberately moving them to newly suitable areas, is debated as a last resort. This overview surveys the arguments for and a…

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…

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…

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…

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-…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Detecting whether bobcats are advancing into lynx range requires repeated, detection-corrected surveys across the contact zone. This overview surveys the field and analytical methods, snow-track surve…