🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This methodological landmark established how camera traps combined with capture-recapture statistics could yield rigorous, repeatable estimates of tiger density. Because individual tigers carry unique…

Karanth KU, Nichols JD · Ecology · 1998

Having passed through an extreme bottleneck, the Amur leopard carries very low genetic diversity and shows signs of inbreeding, raising concerns about long-term viability even as numbers recover. This…

Amur leopards rely chiefly on roe deer, sika deer, and other ungulates whose abundance, depressed by poaching and habitat degradation, limits leopard recovery in the cold forests of the Russian Far Ea…

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES, governs cross-border trade in wildlife, and the world's big cats are listed on its Appendix I, banning commercial international trad…

The Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program, GSLEP, is an intergovernmental initiative uniting the twelve snow leopard range countries around a shared conservation agenda, including a goa…

Namibia's communal conservancy program, which devolves rights to manage and benefit from wildlife to local communities, is among the most studied community-based conservation models and is credited wi…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Leopards are traded for their skins, bones, claws, and teeth across both Asia and Africa, driven by demand for fashion, status, traditional medicine, and ceremonial use. This overview surveys research…

In 2017 the snow leopard was reclassified on the IUCN Red List from Endangered to Vulnerable, a decision based on revised population estimates and the difficulty of demonstrating that numbers had fall…

Wildlife tourism, much of it built around charismatic big cats, generates revenue that can fund conservation and provide community benefits, but the distribution of those benefits strongly affects con…