🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview surveys Styriofelis and related small Miocene cats, sometimes also referred to under names such as Miopanthera, that are placed near the base of the Felinae following the breakup of the…

This overview describes how field teams located collared cats before satellite positioning existed, relying on VHF beacons and directional antennas. Ground observers took compass bearings from multipl…

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…

Genomic studies have revealed that cat evolution is not a clean branching tree but a network shaped by repeated hybridization. This overview synthesizes evidence that lineages within Panthera and else…

Classic home-range estimators assume that successive locations are statistically independent, an assumption that high-frequency GPS data violate flagrantly, since fixes minutes apart are highly correl…

The greatest source of variability in kernel home-range estimates is the smoothing bandwidth, and this overview surveys the competing approaches and their pitfalls. The reference bandwidth tends to ov…

This overview examines how body size influenced which carnivores survived the end-Pleistocene extinctions and which, like the great cats, did not. Large predators tend to have smaller populations, low…

Southeast Asia harbors a rich diversity of poorly studied forest cats, from clouded leopards to marbled cats, leopard cats, and others, and this overview examines the sparse but growing movement resea…

Fitting a collar is an intervention, and this overview surveys efforts to test whether the device itself alters the behavior, movement, or condition of the animal being studied. Concerns include captu…

The sequencing of cat genomes, beginning with the domestic cat and extending to tiger, lion, snow leopard, cheetah, and others, transformed felid systematics. This overview surveys how whole-genome da…

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…

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,…

Home ranges are often summarized by isopleths, contours of the utilization distribution enclosing a chosen percentage of use, with the full range commonly set at 95 percent and the core at 50 percent.…

This overview surveys dental microwear texture analysis, a method that examines microscopic wear features on tooth surfaces to infer what an animal ate shortly before death. In fossil cats, the techni…

This overview examines one of the defining trends in felid evolution: the progressive loss and simplification of teeth from the relatively full dentition of Proailurus to the highly reduced tooth row…

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.…

Dynamic Brownian bridge movement models extend the basic Brownian bridge by letting the animal's movement variance change along the track, so that fast directed travel and slow localized activity are…

Small cats present a hardware problem: their necks may be too slender or their lives too cryptic for conventional collars, so researchers explore alternatives. This overview considers ear-mounted tags…

A wildlife crossing works only if animals are guided to it, and this overview examines the critical role of fencing in funneling wildlife toward structures while keeping them off the road. Exclusion f…

Animals searching for patchy resources often slow down and turn more when they encounter good habitat, a behavior called area-restricted search, and first-passage time is a classic metric for detectin…

Attaching a transmitter to a wild cat raises hard design questions, and this overview surveys how hardware evolved to balance data return against animal welfare. Early ear-mounted and implanted tags g…

Connectivity has two distinct meanings often conflated in conservation, and this overview clarifies them. Structural connectivity describes the physical arrangement of habitat, whether patches are clo…

Movement and gene flow are related but not identical, and this overview examines how the two lines of evidence complement each other in assessing felid connectivity. Telemetry captures the movements o…

Hidden Markov models infer an animal's unobserved behavioral state, such as resting, foraging, or directed travel, from the statistical signatures of its movement, typically step lengths and turning a…

Integrative taxonomy combines independent data classes (morphology, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, ecology, biogeography, and behavior) to delimit taxa, and it has become the standard for resolving ca…

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…

This overview reviews what the skeletons of the earliest cats, especially Proailurus and early Pseudaelurus-grade forms, reveal about their locomotion and likely habits. Features such as relatively lo…

As tracking datasets have grown to millions of points and multi-sensor streams, machine learning has become increasingly central to interpreting them. This overview surveys the application of supervis…

Animals do not move at random or solely in response to immediate cues; they remember productive sites, dangerous areas, and routes, and this overview examines how memory shapes felid movement. Evidenc…