🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Namibia holds one of the largest cheetah populations, much of it on commercial and communal farmland outside protected areas, and this overview synthesizes telemetry research on how cheetahs range acr…

Snow leopards occupy cold, high-elevation habitat that climate change threatens to shrink and fragment, and this overview examines how movement and distribution research informs projections of their f…

Southeast Asia harbors a rich diversity of poorly studied forest cats, from clouded leopards to marbled cats, leopard cats, and others, and this overview examines the sparse but growing movement resea…

Fitting a collar is an intervention, and this overview surveys efforts to test whether the device itself alters the behavior, movement, or condition of the animal being studied. Concerns include captu…

Beyond P-22, several GPS-collared mountain lions in the National Park Service Santa Monica Mountains study have made rare, documented crossings of major freeways, including the 405 and 101, each event…

As climate change shifts the distribution of suitable habitat, corridors that connect populations today may not align with where animals need to move tomorrow, and this overview examines how researche…

Wildlife crossings and fencing are expensive, and this overview examines how their costs are weighed against benefits in road-mitigation planning. Benefits include reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions,…

Wildlife crossings are often designed with large mammals in mind, but smaller felids such as bobcats have distinct preferences, and this overview examines how they use such structures. Monitoring show…

Dead-reckoning reconstructs an animal's detailed path between sparse GPS fixes by integrating heading from a magnetometer with speed inferred from acceleration, producing a continuous trajectory at su…

Home ranges are often summarized by isopleths, contours of the utilization distribution enclosing a chosen percentage of use, with the full range commonly set at 95 percent and the core at 50 percent.…

A major application of step-selection analysis is predicting landscape connectivity by converting estimated selection coefficients into a resistance surface, a map of how difficult each location is fo…

To trust accelerometer-derived energy estimates, researchers validate them against independent physiological measures, and the doubly labelled water method is a gold standard for field metabolic rate.…

To stretch limited battery life, modern collars use duty cycling, turning sensors and the GPS receiver on only at chosen times, and adaptive schedules that intensify sampling when it matters most. Thi…

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…

Small cats present a hardware problem: their necks may be too slender or their lives too cryptic for conventional collars, so researchers explore alternatives. This overview considers ear-mounted tags…

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…

GPS collars do not always acquire a position, and crucially, the probability of failure is not random: dense canopy, steep terrain, and an animal resting in a cave or thicket all suppress fixes. This…

Attaching a transmitter to a wild cat raises hard design questions, and this overview surveys how hardware evolved to balance data return against animal welfare. Early ear-mounted and implanted tags g…

Connectivity has two distinct meanings often conflated in conservation, and this overview clarifies them. Structural connectivity describes the physical arrangement of habitat, whether patches are clo…

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…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative proposed a range-wide network of corridors linking jaguar populations from Mexico to Argentina, and this overview examines the ongoing effort to verify and refine those…

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 examines efforts to apply accelerometer and GPS-cluster methods to snow leopards, whose remote, high-altitude haunts make direct observation nearly impossible. By combining collars with…

This overview synthesizes telemetry research on jaguars across the contrasting landscapes of the Brazilian Pantanal wetlands and the Amazon forest, where GPS collars have revealed how home-range size,…

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…