🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This influential analysis argued that wild tigers persist at meaningful densities across only a small fraction of their range, with the great majority of remaining animals concentrated in a limited se…

Walston J, Robinson JG, Bennett EL, et al. · PLoS Biology · 2010

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

This genetic study sampled tigers across their range to clarify how many distinct lineages exist and how they are distributed. By analyzing molecular markers, the authors described population structur…

Luo SJ, Kim JH, Johnson WE, et al. · PLoS Biology · 2004

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 Amur tiger of the Russian Far East and northeast China recovered from near-extinction in the mid-twentieth century to a stable population spread across vast temperate forests. This overview survey…

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…

This overview examines the science and management history of India's Project Tiger, launched in 1973, and the expanding network of tiger reserves it created. Researchers have studied how core-buffer z…

The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, known as SMART, is widely deployed in tiger reserves to make ranger patrols data-driven. This overview surveys research evaluating how recording patrol route…

The mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, shared by India and Bangladesh, support a unique tiger population adapted to a tidal, saline, swimming-intensive environment. This overview surveys research on…

Big cats are often used as umbrella species, whose large area requirements mean that protecting them also protects many co-occurring species, and as flagship species, whose charisma mobilizes public s…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…