🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Dynamic Brownian bridge movement models extend the basic Brownian bridge by letting the animal's movement variance change along the track, so that fast directed travel and slow localized activity are…

A wildlife crossing works only if animals are guided to it, and this overview examines the critical role of fencing in funneling wildlife toward structures while keeping them off the road. Exclusion f…

Animals searching for patchy resources often slow down and turn more when they encounter good habitat, a behavior called area-restricted search, and first-passage time is a classic metric for detectin…

Movement and gene flow are related but not identical, and this overview examines how the two lines of evidence complement each other in assessing felid connectivity. Telemetry captures the movements o…

Hidden Markov models infer an animal's unobserved behavioral state, such as resting, foraging, or directed travel, from the statistical signatures of its movement, typically step lengths and turning a…

Living near people may force cats to expend energy differently, and this overview synthesizes research linking human-modified landscapes to the energetics of felid movement. Building on biologging stu…

This overview synthesizes how GPS cluster methods have been applied across felid species to estimate how often cats kill and what they eat, turning location data into quantitative diet and predation-r…

Two dominant modeling frameworks translate landscape resistance into predicted movement corridors, and this overview compares them. Least-cost path analysis finds the single cheapest route between hab…

Beyond habitat loss, human landscapes emit pervasive light and noise, and this overview examines their effects on the movement and activity of cats. Artificial light at night can alter the cover-depen…

Southern California's cougars persist in mountain ranges increasingly isolated by freeways and development, and this overview examines the science of designing functional linkages between blocks such…

Combining magnetometers with accelerometers gives biologgers both the orientation and the dynamic motion of an animal's body, enabling unusually detailed reconstruction of hunting behavior. This overv…

Animals do not move at random or solely in response to immediate cues; they remember productive sites, dangerous areas, and routes, and this overview examines how memory shapes felid movement. Evidenc…

Demonstrating that a wildlife crossing works requires monitoring, and this overview surveys the methods used to document which animals use structures and how often. Remote cameras provide continuous,…

Net squared displacement, the squared straight-line distance from a starting point over time, provides a simple but powerful way to classify whole-trajectory movement strategies. This overview describ…

Overall dynamic body acceleration, or ODBA, sums the dynamic component of acceleration across three axes to provide a low-cost proxy for an animal's rate of energy use. This overview explains the rati…

Range expansions often begin with a handful of pioneering individuals making improbable journeys into vacant habitat, and this overview examines how movement science documents these events for cats. W…

Where pumas share landscapes with people, they often avoid humans in time as well as space, becoming more nocturnal to sidestep daytime human activity, and this overview synthesizes the telemetry evid…

Outdoor recreation brings people deep into wildlife habitat, and this overview examines how hiking, biking, and trail use affect puma movement and space use. Telemetry studies show that pumas often av…

Rivers, streams, and the vegetated strips along them often serve as natural movement corridors for cats, offering cover, water, prey, and continuous habitat threading through otherwise open or develop…

In fragmented and urbanizing landscapes, vehicle collisions rank among the foremost causes of death for pumas, and this overview synthesizes telemetry-based survival studies documenting the toll. GPS…

Roads influence felid movement in layered ways, and this overview synthesizes how telemetry reveals them acting simultaneously as sources of mortality, physical and behavioral barriers, and selective…

This overview compares the main architectures of modern GPS collars and their consequences for felid fieldwork. Store-on-board units log positions to internal memory and require recapture or a timed d…

The Black Hills of South Dakota host a recovering cougar population that has become a documented source of long-distance dispersers spreading eastward across the Great Plains. This overview synthesize…

In 2011 a young male cougar was struck and killed on a Connecticut parkway, far outside any known breeding population in the eastern United States. This overview describes how genetic analysis and a t…

The wildlife crossings along the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park constitute one of the longest-running, most comprehensively monitored road-mitigation programs in the world, and this…

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, under construction over US Highway 101 at Liberty Canyon near Los Angeles, is among the largest wildlife crossings in the world and was conceived largely to res…

The COVID-19 lockdowns created an unprecedented, sudden reduction in human activity dubbed the anthropause, and this overview examines what it revealed and may yet reveal about how cats respond to hum…

Standard home ranges flatten an animal's world onto a two-dimensional map, but cats in mountainous terrain move through strongly three-dimensional space, and their ranges shift across seasons. This ov…

Beyond static home ranges, researchers increasingly analyze how often and how regularly an animal returns to particular places, using revisitation and residence-time metrics. This overview describes t…

Roads impede wildlife not only by the physical danger of traffic but through sensory disturbance, and this overview examines how noise and artificial light can deter felids from approaching or crossin…