🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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

Hornocker combined winter snow-tracking with radio-telemetry to quantify how cougars hunt mule deer and elk in central Idaho. By relocating collared lions and back-tracking to their kills, he estimate…

Maurice G. Hornocker · Wildlife Monographs · 1970

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

Anderson and Lindzey pioneered the use of GPS location clusters to detect cougar kills, exploiting the fact that a lion lingers at a carcass to feed over one or more days, producing a tight cluster of…

Charles R. Anderson Jr., Frederick G. Lindzey · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 2003

Knopff and colleagues rigorously evaluated how GPS cluster methods perform for estimating cougar predation, testing how fix interval, search protocol, and model assumptions affect inferences about kil…

Kyle H. Knopff, Aliah A. Knopff, Mark S. Boyce · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 2009

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

This landmark monograph reported one of the first multi-year radio-telemetry studies of cougars, conducted in the rugged Idaho Primitive Area. By collaring and following individual lions, the team doc…

John Seidensticker, Maurice Hornocker, Wilbur Wiles, John Messick · Wildlife Monographs · 1973

Before GPS collars became affordable, the Argos satellite system offered the first way to track animals that roamed beyond the reach of ground crews. Argos estimated a transmitter's position from the…

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…

When Interstate 75 was extended across southern Florida as Alligator Alley, wildlife underpasses with continuous fencing were incorporated specifically to reduce roadkill of the endangered Florida pan…

The Florida panther, an isolated cougar population confined to the southern tip of Florida, depends on a shrinking, fragmented landscape threaded by highways and expanding development. This overview s…

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 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…

Interstate 90 over Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State bisects forested habitat in the Cascade Range, and an extensive program of wildlife overpasses and underpasses has been built to restore movement…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…