🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Cochran and Lord described one of the first practical VHF radio-tracking systems built for free-ranging wildlife, pairing miniaturized transmitters with directional receiving antennas to fix animal po…

William W. Cochran, Rexford D. Lord Jr. · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 1963

McCarthy, Fuller, and Munkhtsog reported one of the first detailed studies of snow leopard movement, using VHF telemetry to track cats in the mountains of southwestern Mongolia. Despite the constraint…

Thomas M. McCarthy, Todd K. Fuller, Bariushaa Munkhtsog · Biological Conservation · 2005

Leopards are among the most adaptable big cats, persisting from deserts to forests to the edges of cities, and this overview synthesizes telemetry research on their ranging across African landscapes.…

Estimating snow leopard home ranges is especially vulnerable to the autocorrelation problem because dense GPS fixes from a slow-ranging mountain cat are highly correlated, and this overview examines t…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Where cats and livestock overlap, the distribution of herds and the layout of settlements shape predator movement, and this overview synthesizes telemetry insights relevant to conflict. GPS data show…

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…

Whether snow leopards maintain stable home ranges or wander nomadically is a genuine and consequential question, and this overview examines the evidence telemetry has brought to bear. Resident adults…

Before estimating a home range, one must verify that the animal actually has one, that its movement is range-resident rather than dispersing, migrating, or nomadic. This overview describes diagnostic…

When GPS collars replaced VHF on snow leopards, they revealed home ranges dramatically larger than earlier studies had suggested, and this overview examines why. VHF tracking in such rugged, remote te…

Beyond mapping where snow leopards go, collar-mounted activity sensors and fix-timing data reveal when they are active, and this overview synthesizes what telemetry shows about their diel and seasonal…

Predator movement is often shaped by the movements of prey, and this overview examines how snow leopard ranging relates to the distribution and movements of wild ungulates such as ibex, argali, and bl…

Snow leopards are strongly associated with broken, cliffy terrain, and this overview examines how their fine-scale movement follows ridgelines, cliff bases, and rugged features that provide stalking c…

This overview synthesizes telemetry evidence on how snow leopards disperse across the vast, rugged mountain systems of Central and South Asia. GPS-collared individuals, especially subadults, have unde…

Applying the GPS-cluster method developed for pumas to snow leopards has begun to quantify how often these cats kill and what they eat, central questions for both ecology and conflict management. This…

Snow leopards inhabit steep mountain landscapes where conditions and prey shift markedly with elevation and season, and this overview examines how their movements track these changes. GPS telemetry ha…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…