🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Rangers are not only enforcers but also data collectors, and ranger-based monitoring uses their patrols to gather information on wildlife, threats, and law-enforcement effort. This overview surveys re…

In the Russian Far East, orphaned and conflict-involved Amur tiger cubs have been rehabilitated and released back into the wild, including into areas where tigers had become scarce, offering a distinc…

Conservation funding is limited, prompting research into how to maximize the return on investment, achieving the greatest conservation benefit per dollar spent on big cats and other carnivores. This o…

Restoring large carnivores can reshape entire ecosystems through trophic cascades, in which predators influence prey behavior and numbers, which in turn affects vegetation and other species. This over…

Roads fragment habitat, kill animals, and act as barriers to movement, making road ecology an important field for carnivore conservation. This overview surveys research on how roads affect big cats an…

As Iberian lynx populations expanded into landscapes crossed by roads, vehicle collisions became a leading cause of death, threatening to offset gains from breeding and reintroduction. This overview s…

Roads bisecting cheetah habitat in central Iran have become a notable cause of Asiatic cheetah deaths, a severe problem for a population so small that each loss is consequential. This overview surveys…

GPS satellite collars have transformed understanding of snow leopard ecology, revealing that these cats range over far larger areas than once assumed. This overview surveys telemetry research showing…

Wire snares are among the most pervasive and indiscriminate threats to big cats, killing or maiming tigers, leopards, lions, and other predators directly and decimating the prey populations they depen…

Across the high mountains of Asia, snow leopards prey on domestic sheep, goats, and yaks, creating conflict with herding communities whose livelihoods depend on their animals. This overview surveys re…

Genetic studies of snow leopards have sought to characterize diversity and structure across a range spanning the Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau, and Central Asian mountains. This overview surveys research,…

Snow leopards are killed and traded for their thick pelts and their bones, the latter increasingly drawn into the same markets that consume tiger and lion bone. This overview surveys research on snow…

Snow leopards depend primarily on wild mountain ungulates such as blue sheep, ibex, argali, and marmots, and the health of these prey populations governs snow leopard numbers. This overview surveys re…

Reintroducing big cats is as much a social undertaking as a biological one, since restored predators can prey on livestock and provoke fear, and local opposition can doom a project regardless of its e…

How animals are released strongly affects reintroduction success, and conservationists distinguish soft release, in which animals are held in on-site enclosures and supported after release, from hard…

This overview surveys research treating tiger populations as networks of sources, where reproduction exceeds mortality, and sinks, where animals die faster than they breed but persist through immigrat…

Reintroducing large carnivores is difficult and often fails, prompting research into what distinguishes successful efforts. This overview surveys studies and the IUCN guidelines that synthesize lesson…

Systematic conservation planning provides a structured, transparent approach to deciding where to focus conservation, using explicit goals and software tools such as Marxan to design efficient network…

A growing array of technologies, including drones, thermal cameras, acoustic sensors, and networked alarm systems, has been deployed to detect and deter poaching of big cats and their prey. This overv…

The Amur leopard, a cold-adapted subspecies of the temperate forests of the Russian Far East and northeast China, became one of the rarest cats on Earth, falling to only a few dozen wild individuals.…

The Asiatic cheetah, once ranging across southwest and central Asia, now survives only in Iran, where it numbers a critically small number of individuals scattered across vast arid landscapes. This ov…

The Asiatic lion, once spread across southwest Asia, survives as a single wild population in and around the Gir forest of Gujarat, India, recovered from a few dozen animals a century ago to several hu…

Adopted at the 2010 St. Petersburg summit, the Global Tiger Recovery Program coordinated commitments from the thirteen tiger range countries around the goal of doubling wild tigers. This overview surv…

Reflecting its recovery, the Iberian lynx was downlisted on the IUCN Red List from Critically Endangered to Endangered, and later assessments recognized further improvement as populations and range co…

A coordinated captive breeding program was a cornerstone of Iberian lynx recovery, producing animals for reintroduction while safeguarding genetic diversity. This overview surveys research underpinnin…

The Iberian lynx, once the world's most endangered cat, fell to roughly a hundred animals in two isolated Spanish populations early this century before an intensive, sustained recovery effort reversed…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative is a range-wide effort to maintain a connected network of habitat allowing jaguars to move between core populations from Mexico to Argentina. This overview surveys resea…

The Lion Guardians model, developed in Maasai lands of East Africa, employs young men from local communities, often former lion hunters, to monitor lions, warn herders, reinforce enclosures, and reduc…

The Population Assessment of the World's Snow Leopards, known as PAWS, is a coordinated international effort to produce the first robust, range-wide estimate of snow leopard numbers using standardized…

The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, SMART, has become a global standard for making ranger patrols data-driven across big cat reserves. This overview surveys research on how SMART records patrol…