🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This landmark study revealed that cheetahs possess extraordinarily low genetic variation, so low that skin grafts exchanged between unrelated individuals were not rejected, indicating near-uniformity…

O'Brien SJ, Roelke ME, Marker L, et al. · Science · 1985

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A small, cryptic population of cheetahs survives across the Sahara and Sahel of Northwest Africa, representing a distinct and critically endangered lineage adapted to extreme desert conditions. This o…

In South Africa, cheetahs persist in numerous small, fenced reserves too isolated to function as a natural population, so conservationists manage them collectively as a metapopulation by translocating…

A persistent trafficking route moves cheetah cubs from the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden to markets on the Arabian Peninsula, where they are sold as exotic pets. This overview surveys researc…

This range-wide assessment compiled distribution and population data to show that cheetahs have been lost from the large majority of their historical range and now number only a few thousand adults, w…

Durant SM, Mitchell N, Groom R, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2017