🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Riley and colleagues combined radio-telemetry with genetic analysis of bobcats and coyotes split by a major Los Angeles freeway, showing that the road acted as both a physical and a social barrier to…

Seth P. D. Riley, John P. Pollinger, Raymond M. Sauvajot, Eric C. York, Cassity Bromley, Todd K. Fuller, Robert K. Wayne · Molecular Ecology · 2006

This paper introduced the daily diary concept, a multi-sensor logger recording tri-axial acceleration, magnetometry, and environmental variables at high frequency to reconstruct an animal's behavior a…

Rory P. Wilson, Emily L. C. Shepard, Nikolai Liebsch · Endangered Species Research · 2008

This overview synthesizes telemetry research on African lion movement and pride ranging, drawing on long-term projects such as the Oxford-led study in and around Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. GPS co…

Every GPS collar embodies a compromise: more frequent fixes reveal finer movement detail but drain the battery faster, shortening the tracking period. This overview examines how researchers schedule f…

This overview describes how field teams located collared cats before satellite positioning existed, relying on VHF beacons and directional antennas. Ground observers took compass bearings from multipl…

This overview surveys how tri-axial acceleration data from collars are translated into behavioral states for cats, enabling activity budgets and the detection of key events like kills. Researchers typ…

Movement models can be turned around to simulate animals, generating virtual trajectories from estimated movement rules to predict population-level patterns. This overview describes agent-based and in…

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…

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 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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…