🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Beyond distribution models, conservationists use structured climate vulnerability assessments that combine a species' exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity into an overall risk rating. This ove…

The Amur leopard's range straddles the border between the Russian Far East and northeast China, making transboundary cooperation essential to its conservation. This overview surveys research and polic…

The snow leopard's range spans a dozen countries across the mountains of Asia, making transboundary cooperation essential. This overview synthesizes how conservation has shifted toward large, connecte…

Many large carnivore landscapes span international borders, prompting the creation of transboundary protected areas, sometimes called peace parks, that link reserves across countries into larger conse…

Snow leopard range spans twelve countries, so climate-resilient conservation requires cooperation across contested international borders. This overview reviews how initiatives like the Global Snow Leo…

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…

Leopards famously haul their kills into trees, a behavior with clear ecological logic. This overview synthesizes research showing that caching prey in trees protects it from kleptoparasitism by lions,…

A survey of the leopard's distinctive habit of hauling kills, sometimes heavier than itself, into trees, and the ecological drivers behind it. Tree caching is most pronounced where lions and spotted h…

Few felid groups have generated as much naming confusion as the small spotted tiger cats of South America, variously called oncilla, tigrina, or tiger cat. This overview traces the tangled taxonomy, f…

Faecal glucocorticoid metabolite monitoring is the workhorse of felid stress research because it avoids the confound of capture and restraint, but it requires species-specific validation to be meaning…

This overview synthesises studies analysing who is attacked by tigers and leopards and under what circumstances, drawing on incident records across South Asia. It reviews patterns by age, sex, occupat…

Climate warming is enabling herders to graze livestock at higher elevations and later into the season, expanding the overlap between domestic stock and snow leopard core habitat. This overview examine…

Small wild cats, servals, ocelots, fishing cats, sand cats, margays and others, are widely held yet receive less welfare research attention than big cats. This overview surveys their husbandry needs:…

Camera traps illuminate night scenes either with a bright white (xenon or LED) flash that yields full-color images or with infrared illumination that produces monochrome photos invisible to most anima…

The roaring big cats and the purring small cats appear to form complementary groups, and this overview reviews the basis and limits of this divide. The flexible, incompletely ossified hyoid and specia…

Cheetahs naturally occur at low densities and require large areas, a consequence of competition, prey, and their hunting strategy. This overview synthesizes research showing that suppression by lions…

Cat classification is not merely academic; it directly shapes how cats are protected. This overview explains how taxonomy underlies Red List assessments, CITES appendices, and national legislation, al…

Black panthers are melanistic leopards (or jaguars), and their existence is often misunderstood as indicating a separate species or subspecies. This overview explains the genetics of leopard melanism,…

Genetic tools are increasingly used to combat the illegal trade in cats and their parts, from tiger bones and skins to confiscated live animals. This overview surveys how forensic genetics assigns sei…

Controlling rabies in its wildlife and domestic reservoirs indirectly protects wild felids that are spillover victims of the disease. This overview surveys rabies control strategies relevant to felid…

Because leopard cats depend on farmland outside reserves, conservation increasingly relies on incentivising landholders to farm in ways compatible with the species. This overview synthesises evaluatio…

This synthesis reviews the conservation standing of the clouded leopards, both species regarded as threatened owing to their dependence on forest and exposure to rapid habitat loss. It weighs deforest…

This synthesis reviews the conservation standing of the leopard cat, broadly secure across its vast range thanks to adaptability and tolerance of human-modified habitats, while noting important except…

This study developed and tested protocols for hormonally inducing ovulation and performing laparoscopic artificial insemination in two nondomestic felids. The authors administered exogenous gonadotrop…

Howard JG, Roth TL, Byers AP, Swanson WF, Wildt DE · Biology of Reproduction · 1997

This comprehensive study screened thousands of samples from many felid species plus hyenas for feline immunodeficiency virus and sequenced isolates to map viral diversity. The authors confirmed that F…

J. L. Troyer, J. Pecon-Slattery, M. E. Roelke, et al. · Journal of Virology · 2005

Borchers and Efford provided the rigorous likelihood-based foundation for spatially explicit capture-recapture, formalizing how to estimate density when detectors such as camera stations have fixed lo…

David L. Borchers, Murray G. Efford · Biometrics · 2008

This widely cited review synthesized the theory and practice of species distribution models (SDMs), the statistical tools that relate species occurrence to environmental predictors to map current and…

Elith, J., Leathwick, J.R. · Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · 2009

This sweeping review synthesized the global status of the world's largest carnivores, including big cats such as tigers, lions, and leopards, and documented that most are declining and have lost large…

Ripple WJ, Estes JA, Beschta RL, et al. · Science · 2014

This influential review synthesized the global status of the largest carnivores, including big cats such as lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars, documenting widespread range contraction and populatio…

Ripple, W.J., Estes, J.A., Beschta, R.L., Wilmers, C.C., Ritchie, E.G., Hebblewhite, M., et al. · Science · 2014

Mason's review synthesised decades of work on stereotypic behaviour across captive species, defining stereotypies as repetitive, invariant movements with no obvious goal. She argued they arise from fr…

Mason GJ · Animal Behaviour · 1991