🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Lions once ranged across Africa, southeast Europe, the Middle East, and into India, but have lost the overwhelming majority of that historical distribution. This overview surveys research reconstructi…

Reducing conflict between people and big cats is essential for coexistence, and a wide range of interventions has been developed and tested. This overview surveys research evaluating these measures, w…

As tiger populations recover and human settlements press against reserves, conflict over livestock depredation and human casualties becomes a central conservation challenge. This overview surveys rese…

Indigenous and local communities hold deep knowledge of big cats and their environments, and increasingly conservation recognizes the value of this knowledge and the rights of these communities as ste…

Landscape genetics has become a powerful tool for assessing whether tiger corridors actually carry gene flow between reserves in central India. This overview surveys research that samples tiger DNA ac…

Before SMART became widespread, systems such as MIST and the CITES MIKE program pioneered structured monitoring of law-enforcement effort and illegal killing, and these frameworks remain important to…

Conservation planners model wildlife corridors using methods such as least-cost path analysis and circuit theory, which translate landscapes into surfaces of movement resistance to predict where anima…

Genetic studies have reshaped understanding of how lions are organized across their range, revealing deeper structure than the traditional African-Asiatic split implies. This overview surveys research…

South Africa has reintroduced lions into numerous fenced reserves where they had been extirpated, creating a network of small, intensively managed populations. This overview surveys research on these…

Conservation strategy for lions increasingly centers on the concept of strongholds, large protected landscapes that hold robust, well-connected lion populations capable of long-term persistence. This…

Retaliatory and preemptive killing of lions by pastoralists protecting livestock is a leading cause of lion decline outside core protected areas. This overview surveys research on the drivers of depre…

Livestock guarding dogs, such as Anatolian shepherds placed with herds, are a widely promoted nonlethal tool for reducing predation and the retaliatory killing of cats like cheetahs and leopards. This…

One of the longest-running studies of any wild big cat, the decades-long monitoring of lions in the Serengeti ecosystem has produced foundational knowledge of lion biology and conservation. This overv…

South Africa's reintroduction of cheetahs into many small reserves has produced a managed metapopulation sustained by coordinated translocations between sites. This overview surveys research on the re…

India's periodic all-India tiger estimation is among the largest wildlife surveys on Earth, combining sign-based occupancy across vast landscapes with camera-trap capture-recapture at intensively samp…

Where camera-trap density estimation is too costly to deploy everywhere, occupancy modelling lets researchers map where tigers are present across large landscapes using detection-nondetection data fro…

Many protected areas exist on maps but lack the staff, funding, and enforcement to deliver real protection, a phenomenon known as paper parks. This overview surveys research using tools such as the Ma…

Beyond compensating losses, some programs pay communities or landowners directly for conserving predators or their habitat, aligning economic incentives with conservation. This overview surveys resear…

Population viability analysis, PVA, uses demographic and genetic models to estimate the probability that a population will persist over a given time, helping conservationists assess risk and compare m…

Reinforcing the enclosures, or bomas, where livestock are kept at night is among the most direct ways to reduce predation by lions, leopards, and other cats, and thereby retaliatory killing. This over…

Researchers have applied predictive modelling and machine learning to anti-poaching, using past patrol and poaching data to forecast where illegal activity is most likely and to optimize where rangers…

The Asiatic cheetah depends on wild ungulates such as gazelle, wild sheep, and wild goat, whose populations have been depleted across central Iran by poaching, livestock competition, and habitat degra…

Many forests across tiger range remain structurally intact yet hold few or no tigers because their large prey have been hunted out, a condition often called the empty forest syndrome. This overview su…

This overview surveys research examining how well protected areas sustain large carnivore populations and which reserve characteristics predict persistence. Studies show that reserve size, connectivit…

Individual protected areas are often too small to hold viable big cat populations on their own, making connectivity between reserves critical. This overview surveys research on how isolation affects c…

Protected areas are not permanent; governments sometimes weaken, shrink, or abolish them, a set of actions researchers call PADDD, for protected-area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement. This o…

Protected areas are governed in many ways, from strict state-run parks to community conservancies and indigenous-managed lands, and governance shapes both conservation outcomes and social justice. Thi…

Pumas in human-dominated regions of North America, such as the mountain lions of southern California, have become a vivid case study in the consequences of severed connectivity. This overview surveys…

The Iberian lynx is a rabbit specialist, and the collapse of European rabbit populations from the viral diseases myxomatosis and rabbit hemorrhagic disease was a central driver of the lynx's near-exti…

The effectiveness of protected areas for big cats rests heavily on rangers, yet many reserves are chronically understaffed and underfunded. This overview surveys research quantifying the resources nee…