🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Estimating snow leopard density relies heavily on camera trapping combined with capture-recapture, exploiting the unique rosette and spot patterns that allow individual identification. This overview s…

Long-term camera-trap monitoring underpins knowledge of the Amur leopard, allowing researchers to identify every individual in the population by its unique rosette pattern and to track numbers, surviv…

Monitoring the Asiatic cheetah depends on camera trapping across the remote arid reserves of central Iran, where the animals occur at extremely low density over enormous areas. This overview surveys r…

Given the critically small wild population, captive breeding has been considered and attempted as a potential safeguard for the Asiatic cheetah, though with significant difficulty. This overview surve…

Cheetah cubs suffer extremely high mortality in the wild, and understanding its causes has been central to assessing the species' resilience. This overview surveys research, much of it from long-term…

The illegal trade in live cheetah cubs for the exotic pet market follows established routes from the Horn of Africa across to the Arabian Peninsula, and this overview surveys research mapping and quan…

Cheetahs range over very large areas at low density, a trait central to understanding why they are so hard to conserve. This overview surveys telemetry and movement research documenting cheetah home r…

India, which lost its native Asiatic cheetahs to extinction in the mid-twentieth century, has undertaken a project to reintroduce cheetahs using animals sourced from Africa, released at Kuno National…

Namibia holds one of the world's largest cheetah populations, the majority living on commercial and communal farmland where conflict with livestock and game farmers is a primary threat. This overview…

Because cheetahs occur at naturally low densities and avoid areas with high lion and hyena numbers, most cheetahs live outside formal protected areas on farmland and communal rangelands. This overview…

Snow leopards inhabit cold, high-elevation environments that are projected to shrink as climate warming pushes the treeline upward and alters alpine ecosystems. This overview surveys research modellin…

Climate change poses varied threats to the world's cats, and assessing which species and populations are most vulnerable is increasingly important for prioritization. This overview surveys research on…

Because snow leopards live among pastoralist communities across remote mountains, community-based programs are central to their conservation. This overview surveys research on initiatives that align l…

Effective anti-poaching increasingly depends on cooperation from local communities, including informant networks that provide intelligence on poaching and trafficking. This overview surveys research o…

Community-based natural resource management, CBNRM, devolves authority over wildlife and habitat to local communities on the premise that local stewardship, backed by tangible benefits, conserves bett…

Compensation and insurance schemes aim to offset the costs that big cats impose on livestock owners, reducing the incentive for retaliatory killing. This overview surveys research evaluating these fin…

As climate change shifts the distribution of suitable habitat, connectivity must allow species to track those changes by moving to newly suitable areas, adding a dynamic dimension to corridor planning…

With far more conservation need than funding, the controversial idea of conservation triage proposes deciding where to invest based on cost, feasibility, and likely return, potentially accepting that…

With limited resources, conservationists must decide which corridors to protect first, and whether continuous corridors or chains of habitat stepping stones best serve wide-ranging cats. This overview…

Because enforcement alone struggles to stop trade driven by persistent consumer demand, conservationists increasingly invest in demand-reduction interventions aimed at changing the behavior of people…

For a population as small as the Amur leopard's, infectious disease poses a potentially catastrophic risk, as a single outbreak could affect a large fraction of all wild individuals. This overview sur…

Estimating cheetah abundance is challenging because the species occurs at low density, ranges widely, and is not as reliably individually identifiable from camera traps as boldly patterned cats. This…

Counting lions reliably is surprisingly difficult, and methodological choices strongly affect the numbers that drive conservation decisions. This overview surveys techniques used to estimate lion abun…

The IUCN Red List provides the standard framework for assessing the extinction risk of the world's cats, guiding conservation priorities and tracking changes in status over time. This overview surveys…

Because the entire wild Amur leopard population is confined to one small area, conservationists have long studied the feasibility of establishing a second, geographically separate population as insura…

Forensic science has become a powerful tool against the illegal trade in big cat parts, allowing seized skins, bones, and other products to be identified to species, and sometimes to population or ind…

The genetic composition of founders and the rigor of post-release monitoring are central to reintroduction success, and this overview surveys research on both. Studies show that too few founders, or f…

Conservation science distinguishes structural connectivity, the physical continuity of habitat, from functional connectivity, whether animals actually move through it. This overview surveys research o…

Genetic data provide a direct way to measure whether animals are successfully moving and breeding between populations, making gene flow a key metric of functional connectivity. This overview surveys h…

Genetic studies have shown that the Asiatic cheetah is distinct from African cheetah populations, having diverged long enough ago to represent a separate evolutionary lineage worth conserving in its o…