🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This large-scale study evaluated whether protected areas around the world actually reduce human pressures by comparing changes in indicators such as cropland conversion and human footprint inside prot…

Geldmann J, Manica A, Burgess ND, Coad L, Balmford A · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2019

This influential study assessed whether tropical protected areas actually work by surveying parks across many countries and comparing conditions inside their boundaries with the surrounding landscape.…

Bruner AG, Gullison RE, Rice RE, da Fonseca GAB · Science · 2001

This study quantified how much range the world's large carnivores have lost by comparing historical and current distributions across many species, including big cats. The authors found that large carn…

Wolf C, Ripple WJ · Royal Society Open Science · 2017

Global biodiversity policy has coalesced around targets to protect or conserve thirty percent of land and sea by 2030, widely known as 30x30. This overview surveys research on what such area-based tar…

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…

Key Biodiversity Areas are sites identified as significant for the global persistence of biodiversity, and they offer a framework for prioritizing places critical to big cats. This overview surveys re…

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…

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…

Effective anti-poaching increasingly depends on cooperation from local communities, including informant networks that provide intelligence on poaching and trafficking. This overview surveys research o…

Community-based natural resource management, CBNRM, devolves authority over wildlife and habitat to local communities on the premise that local stewardship, backed by tangible benefits, conserves bett…

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…

With far more conservation need than funding, the controversial idea of conservation triage proposes deciding where to invest based on cost, feasibility, and likely return, potentially accepting that…

With limited resources, conservationists must decide which corridors to protect first, and whether continuous corridors or chains of habitat stepping stones best serve wide-ranging cats. This overview…

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…

The IUCN Red List provides the standard framework for assessing the extinction risk of the world's cats, guiding conservation priorities and tracking changes in status over time. This overview surveys…

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…

The genetic composition of founders and the rigor of post-release monitoring are central to reintroduction success, and this overview surveys research on both. Studies show that too few founders, or f…

Conservation science distinguishes structural connectivity, the physical continuity of habitat, from functional connectivity, whether animals actually move through it. This overview surveys research o…

Genetic data provide a direct way to measure whether animals are successfully moving and breeding between populations, making gene flow a key metric of functional connectivity. This overview surveys h…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…