🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This foundational study built a continental-scale model of jaguar habitat and connectivity from northern Mexico to Argentina, identifying core populations and the corridors linking them. Using expert…

Rabinowitz, A., Zeller, K.A. · Biological Conservation · 2010

This range-wide assessment re-evaluated the jaguar's conservation status by compiling occurrence and threat data across the Americas, concluding that the species has lost a substantial share of its hi…

de la Torre, J.A., Gonzalez-Maya, J.F., Zarza, H., Ceballos, G., Medellin, R.A. · Oryx · 2017

This landmark study produced the first globally consistent, high-resolution maps of forest loss and gain in the 21st century using satellite imagery, quantifying deforestation at fine scale across the…

Hansen, M.C., Potapov, P.V., Moore, R., Hancher, M., Turubanova, S.A., Tyukavina, A., et al. · Science · 2013

This paper introduced the MaxEnt method, a maximum-entropy approach for modeling species distributions from presence-only data, which became one of the most widely used tools in the field. Because muc…

Phillips, S.J., Anderson, R.P., Schapire, R.E. · Ecological Modelling · 2006

The Amazon holds the largest contiguous jaguar population, making its deforestation the single biggest habitat threat to the species. This overview surveys how forest clearing for cattle ranching, soy…

Climate models and ecological research raise concern that combined deforestation and warming could push parts of the Amazon past a tipping point toward drier, savanna-like vegetation, with profound im…

Expanding agricultural frontiers, soy and cattle in South America, oil palm in Southeast Asia, smallholder farming in Africa and Asia, are among the largest drivers of habitat loss for wild cats. This…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The grain and extent at which a habitat model is built strongly influence its conclusions, a key consideration for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys how the choice of spatial resolution, from c…

Identifying where to concentrate conservation under climate change requires mapping vulnerability, combining exposure to change with the value and irreplaceability of habitat. This overview surveys ho…