🧬 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

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

Using GPS telemetry and field observation, Elbroch and colleagues documented that pumas, long considered strictly solitary, engage in structured social interactions, including tolerated food sharing a…

L. Mark Elbroch, Michael Levy, Mark Lubell, Howard Quigley, Anthony Caragiulo · Science Advances · 2017

Beier combined population modeling with movement and habitat data to estimate how much habitat a cougar population needs to persist and how corridors connecting habitat patches reduce extinction risk.…

Paul Beier · Conservation Biology · 1993

Beier radio-tracked juvenile cougars dispersing through the fragmented Santa Ana Mountains of southern California, documenting how young animals leave their natal areas and search for territory amid e…

Paul Beier · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 1995

Suraci and colleagues extended the ecology-of-fear framework to whole communities, using playbacks of human voices across the Santa Cruz Mountains to test how fear of humans cascades through a food we…

Justin P. Suraci, Michael Clinchy, Liana Y. Zanette, Christopher C. Wilmers · Ecology Letters · 2019

Smith and colleagues, working with the Santa Cruz Puma Project, used playback experiments at puma kill sites, broadcasting human voices versus a control of frog calls, while monitoring the cats' behav…

Justine A. Smith, Justin P. Suraci, Michael Clinchy, Ayana Crawford, Devin Roberts, Liana Y. Zanette, Christopher C. Wilmers · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2017

Riley and colleagues used GPS telemetry and genetics to show that the small puma population in the Santa Monica Mountains was severely isolated by surrounding freeways, with the 101 in particular near…

Seth P. D. Riley, Laurel E. K. Serieys, John P. Pollinger, Jeffrey A. Sikich, Lisa Dalbeck, Robert K. Wayne, Holly B. Ernest · Current Biology · 2014

Williams and colleagues built custom SMART collars combining GPS, accelerometers, and physiological calibration to measure, for the first time, the moment-to-moment energy expenditure of wild pumas as…

Terrie M. Williams, Lisa Wolfe, Tracy Davis, Traci Kendall, Beau Richter, Yiwei Wang, Caleb Bryce, G. Hugh Elkaim, Christopher C. Wilmers · Science · 2014

During COVID-19 lockdowns, reports emerged worldwide of wildlife, including pumas, venturing into emptied urban areas, and this overview examines what such incursions suggest about felid responses to…

This overview synthesizes a body of GPS-telemetry research that transformed understanding of puma ecology by intensively visiting location clusters to study predation, competition, and social behavior…

P-22 was a male puma collared by the National Park Service after he made an improbable journey across two of Los Angeles's busiest freeways, the 405 and the 101, to settle in tiny Griffith Park beside…

This overview describes the integrated collar architecture that combined GPS with an inertial measurement unit of accelerometers and magnetometers to study puma movement and energetics at fine resolut…

Even in the GPS era, VHF remains indispensable for one task: signaling death. This overview describes mortality-mode beacons that change pulse rate when a collar stops moving for a set interval, alert…

Camera collars turn a tracked animal into a first-person observer, recording short video or still bursts that reveal behavior invisible to GPS dots. This overview describes how researchers have mounte…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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