🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This overview synthesizes how GPS cluster methods have been applied across felid species to estimate how often cats kill and what they eat, turning location data into quantitative diet and predation-r…

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…

Local convex hull methods, known as LoCoH, build a home range from many small convex polygons constructed around each location and its nearest neighbors, then merge them into a utilization distributio…

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 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…

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…