🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Snow leopards range across roughly a dozen countries in the mountains of Central and South Asia, and their movements routinely cross international borders, making transboundary connectivity essential…

Across most of their range, snow leopards share the landscape with pastoralist communities and their livestock rather than occupying pristine wilderness, and this overview examines what movement resea…

Battery life is the hard ceiling on tracking duration, so engineers pursue energy harvesting to extend or even indefinitely sustain deployments. This overview covers solar panels integrated into colla…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

State-space models provide a unified statistical framework that separates the true, unobserved movement process from the noisy observation process that telemetry produces. This overview explains how t…

In India and Southeast Asia, tigers move between protected areas through a matrix of forest fragments, plantations, and human settlements, and this overview examines the role of stepping-stone habitat…

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…

This concluding overview synthesizes how the study of felid movement has evolved from sparse VHF triangulation to dense, multi-sensor biologging that captures not only where cats go but what they do a…

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…

This overview traces how VHF radio-telemetry emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, when biologists such as the Craighead brothers fitted grizzly bears in Yellowstone with radio collars and proved that…

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…

This overview synthesizes telemetry and genetic studies of how young tigers leave their natal territories to establish their own ranges across India's reserve network. Subadult tigers, especially male…

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…

Programmable drop-off mechanisms release a collar from the animal at a scheduled time, sparing researchers a second risky capture and ensuring the device does not burden the cat indefinitely. This ove…

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…

Snow leopards routinely move across international borders, and this overview examines the practical and political challenges of tracking a cat whose range spans roughly a dozen countries with varying…

Quantifying how much two animals' ranges overlap is central to questions of territoriality, social structure, and resource competition, and this overview surveys the statistical indices used. Measures…

Predicted corridors are only useful if real animals actually use them, and this overview examines how researchers validate connectivity models against independent movement data. By overlaying GPS trac…

This methodological review tackled two pervasive problems in GPS telemetry: locations are imprecise, and the probability of obtaining a fix at all depends on habitat, terrain, and canopy. Left uncorre…

Jacqueline L. Frair, John Fieberg, Mark Hebblewhite, Francesca Cagnacci, Nicholas J. DeCesare, Luca Pedrotti · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · 2010

Fleming and colleagues confronted a fundamental flaw in conventional kernel home-range estimation: it assumes location data are independent, yet modern GPS fixes are strongly autocorrelated in time, c…

Christen H. Fleming, William F. Fagan, Thomas Mueller, Kirk A. Olson, Peter Leimgruber, Justin M. Calabrese · Ecology · 2015

Vickers and colleagues followed GPS-collared pumas across the rapidly urbanizing landscape of southern California to quantify survival and identify the causes of death driving population decline. They…

T. Winston Vickers, Jessica N. Sanchez, Christine K. Johnson, Scott A. Morrison, Randy Botta, Trish Smith, Brian S. Cohen, Patrick R. Huber, Holly B. Ernest, Walter M. Boyce · PLOS ONE · 2015

Although focused on small-mammal populations, this paper is widely credited with formalizing the minimum convex polygon as a measure of an animal's home range, the smallest convex shape enclosing all…

Carl O. Mohr · American Midland Naturalist · 1947

This influential review synthesized how rapidly improving tracking technology, from GPS tags to accelerometers and global data repositories, had turned animal movement into a powerful sensor network f…

Roland Kays, Margaret C. Crofoot, Walter Jetz, Martin Wikelski · Science · 2015

This review argued that the proliferation of animal-borne sensors, including accelerometers, magnetometers, and physiological loggers, had ushered in a golden age in which ecologists could measure not…

Christopher C. Wilmers, Barry Nickel, Caleb M. Bryce, Justine A. Smith, Rachel E. Wheat, Yiwei Wang · Ecology · 2015

Fortin and colleagues used step-selection functions to show that elk in Yellowstone altered their fine-scale movement decisions in response to wolf predation risk, avoiding risky habitats such as open…

Daniel Fortin, Hawthorne L. Beyer, Mark S. Boyce, Douglas W. Smith, Thierry Duchesne, Julie S. Mao · Ecology · 2005

Calabrese, Fleming, and Gurarie released ctmm, an R package that treats telemetry data as samples from an underlying continuous-time movement process rather than a set of discrete points. The software…

Justin M. Calabrese, Christen H. Fleming, Eliezer Gurarie · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2016