🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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 landmark genetic study explained the long-noted fact that cats show little interest in sweet foods. The researchers found that cats carry a defective, non-functional version of Tas1r2, one of the…

Xia Li, Weihua Li, Hong Wang, et al. · PLoS Genetics · 2005

This study sequenced complete genomes of pumas from across the Americas to examine how range-wide demographic history shaped genetic load and diversity. The authors confirmed the deep divergence betwe…

Nedda F. Saremi, Beth Shapiro, et al. · Nature Communications · 2019

Elbroch and colleagues documented how pumas function as ecosystem engineers by provisioning rich, dependable carrion. Monitoring puma kills with cameras, they recorded a large diversity of vertebrate…

Elbroch, L.M. et al. · Biological Conservation · 2017

Rowcliffe and colleagues extended activity analysis beyond pattern shape to estimate the proportion of time animals spend active, a quantity needed for the Random Encounter Model and for behavioral ec…

J. Marcus Rowcliffe, Roland Kays, Bart Kranstauber, Chris Carbone, Patrick A. Jansen · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2014

This work measured carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in bone collagen from Rancho La Brea mammals, including the predators Smilodon and Panthera atrox alongside their herbivore prey. The isotopic si…

Joan Brenner Coltrain, John M. Harris, Thure E. Cerling, James R. Ehleringer, et al. · Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology · 2004

Cusack and colleagues directly compared placing cameras randomly across the landscape versus targeting them on game trails, using paired deployments in an African savanna. They found that trail-based…

Jeremy J. Cusack, Amy J. Dickman, J. Marcus Rowcliffe, Chris Carbone, David W. Macdonald, Tim Coulson · PLOS ONE · 2015

This study quantified how much range the world's large carnivores have lost by comparing historical and current distributions across many species, including big cats. The authors found that large carn…

Wolf C, Ripple WJ · Royal Society Open Science · 2017

This study conducted the first range-wide genetic analysis of the snow leopard and proposed dividing the species into three subspecies. Using noninvasive samples collected across the snow leopard's mo…

Janecka JE, Zhang Y, Li D, et al. · Journal of Heredity · 2017

Rochlitz reviewed evidence on feline housing across the many settings cats are confined and distilled practical recommendations. She emphasised providing adequate space with vertical structure, hiding…

Rochlitz I · Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery · 1999

Meek and colleagues addressed the inconsistency in how camera-trap studies report their methods, which hampers comparison, replication, and meta-analysis. They proposed a standardized set of metadata…

Paul D. Meek, Guy Ballard, Andrew Claridge, Roland Kays, Karl Vernes, et al. · Biodiversity and Conservation · 2014

This study documented that large carnivores, including the Eurasian lynx, have recovered and persist across much of Europe not in remote wilderness but in landscapes densely settled and used by people…

Chapron G, Kaczensky P, Linnell JDC, et al. · Science · 2014

This study examined how a guild of mammalian carnivores responds to habitat fragmentation in southern California, finding that species differ markedly in their sensitivity to isolation and patch size,…

Crooks, K.R. · Conservation Biology · 2002

This study compared how a suite of carnivores, including bobcats, responded to the size and isolation of urban habitat fragments in coastal southern California. Bobcats and other area-sensitive specie…

Crooks KR · Conservation Biology · 2002

This study compared the outbred Serengeti lion population with the small, geographically isolated Ngorongoro Crater population, which descended from few founders and experienced inbreeding. The author…

Wildt DE, Bush M, Goodrowe KL, Packer C, Pusey AE, Brown JL, Joslin P, O'Brien SJ · Nature · 1987

Nutter, Levine and Stoskopf studied the reproductive biology of free-roaming cats to inform population management, monitoring breeding females in feral colonies. They documented high reproductive outp…

Felicia B. Nutter, Jay F. Levine, Michael K. Stoskopf · Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association · 2004

Using decades of individual life-history records from wild lions and baboons, this study tested whether females experience a true post-reproductive lifespan analogous to human menopause. The authors f…

Packer C, Tatar M, Collins A · Nature · 1998

Global biodiversity policy has coalesced around targets to protect or conserve thirty percent of land and sea by 2030, widely known as 30x30. This overview surveys research on what such area-based tar…

This overview surveys Acinonyx pardinensis, a large extinct cheetah that ranged across Eurasia during the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Considerably bigger than the living cheetah, sometimes approaching t…

The African golden cat is a secretive, rarely seen forest felid of Central and West Africa whose ecology was almost unknown until camera traps began capturing it. This overview surveys how camera surv…

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.…

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…

The Amazon holds the largest contiguous jaguar population, making its deforestation the single biggest habitat threat to the species. This overview surveys how forest clearing for cattle ranching, soy…

Climate models and ecological research raise concern that combined deforestation and warming could push parts of the Amazon past a tipping point toward drier, savanna-like vegetation, with profound im…

Having passed through an extreme bottleneck, the Amur leopard carries very low genetic diversity and shows signs of inbreeding, raising concerns about long-term viability even as numbers recover. This…

Amur leopards rely chiefly on roe deer, sika deer, and other ungulates whose abundance, depressed by poaching and habitat degradation, limits leopard recovery in the cold forests of the Russian Far Ea…

This overview reviews human-tiger conflict involving Amur (Siberian) tigers in the Russian Far East and northeast China, a low-density, cold-forest population. It synthesises studies of livestock and…

The Amur tiger of the Russian Far East and northeast China recovered from near-extinction in the mid-twentieth century to a stable population spread across vast temperate forests. This overview survey…

This overview synthesizes telemetry research on Amur, or Siberian, tigers in the Russian Far East, where GPS collars have revealed enormous home ranges, long movements through snow-bound boreal forest…

The Amur tiger inhabits the temperate and boreal forests of the Russian Far East and northeast China, a very different climate context from tropical tiger populations. This overview surveys how climat…