🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Expanding agricultural frontiers, soy and cattle in South America, oil palm in Southeast Asia, smallholder farming in Africa and Asia, are among the largest drivers of habitat loss for wild cats. This…

Captive big cats commonly require dental procedures, especially for fractured canine teeth, and these interventions demand careful general anesthesia given the size, danger, and physiologic vulnerabil…

The jaguar is the largest American cat and a powerful solitary predator whose behaviour is studied through camera traps, telemetry, and acoustic monitoring. This overview surveys research on jaguar sp…

As apex predators, big cats can exert top-down control that ripples through ecosystems via trophic cascades. This overview synthesizes evidence that lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and jaguars influen…

Jaguars are powerful, semi-aquatic, wide-ranging cats whose captive welfare has been studied through behaviour and non-invasive stress physiology. This overview surveys research on captive jaguars: th…

Across much of the jaguar's range, cattle ranching both fragments habitat and fuels retaliatory killing when jaguars prey on livestock, a conflict that climate and land-use change can intensify. This…

The Pantanal wetland supports one of the densest known jaguar populations, and its future hinges on the flood-drought cycle that climate change is disrupting. This overview surveys how altered rainfal…

Circuit theory, which models animal movement as electrical current flowing across a resistance surface, has become a standard tool for mapping connectivity for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys…

As suitable conditions shift, species need corridors that connect where they live now to where they will need to live, a concept sometimes called climate connectivity. This overview surveys methods fo…

Climate velocity measures how fast and in what direction conditions are shifting across a landscape, indicating the speed at which species must move to keep pace. This overview surveys how climate vel…

This overview synthesises comparative studies that contrast successful and unsuccessful big-cat coexistence efforts to distil transferable lessons. It reviews analyses spanning lion, snow leopard, tig…

This overview synthesises how habitat corridors and connectivity shape big-cat conflict, focusing on the tension between maintaining predator movement and the conflict that arises where corridors pass…

Measuring whether a conservation intervention actually helped requires comparing outcomes against a credible counterfactual of what would have happened otherwise. This overview surveys quasi-experimen…

The most realistic forecasts of cat futures combine climate change with land-use change, since for many forest cats habitat conversion is the faster, larger threat. This overview surveys how integrate…

Cats rarely face climate change in isolation; it interacts with habitat loss, fragmentation, hunting, disease, and conflict to produce cumulative impacts greater than any single threat. This overview…

This overview synthesises scholarship that seeks to define coexistence as a positive conservation goal distinct from the mere absence of conflict. It reviews frameworks conceptualising coexistence as…

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…

This overview synthesises the theory and practice of compensating farmers for livestock killed by big cats as a tolerance-building tool. It reviews recurring design challenges: verifying claims to pre…

Jaguars have one of the most diverse diets of any big cat, recorded preying on dozens of species. This overview synthesizes scat and kill studies documenting how jaguar diet ranges from large mammals…

Jaguars and other Neotropical cats inhabit diverse tropical ecosystems where they encounter a wide array of pathogens and parasites, though their disease ecology remains less studied than that of Afri…

Like tigers, jaguars are individually identifiable by their rosette patterns, making camera-trap capture-recapture a key tool for estimating their density. This overview synthesizes how researchers ac…

The presence of cats in South America results from the Great American Biotic Interchange, when the Isthmus of Panama connected the Americas and allowed northern mammals to disperse south. This overvie…

A survey of how the teeth, jaws and bite mechanics of cats are adapted for killing prey and how these features scale with prey size. Felids dispatch prey with a precise canine bite to the neck or skul…

GPS collars do not always acquire a position, and crucially, the probability of failure is not random: dense canopy, steep terrain, and an animal resting in a cave or thicket all suppress fixes. This…

Captive big cats commonly fracture their large canine teeth through biting enclosure barriers, fighting, or chewing hard objects, exposing the pulp and causing pain and infection that require dental i…

This overview synthesises emerging priorities and frontiers in human-big cat conflict and coexistence research. It reviews calls for more rigorous impact evaluation, greater integration of social scie…

Existing protected-area networks were largely designed around present-day distributions and may not cover where species will need to be as the climate changes. This overview surveys gap analyses that…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative proposed a range-wide network of corridors linking jaguar populations from Mexico to Argentina, and this overview examines the ongoing effort to verify and refine those…

This overview synthesises evidence on why deterrents, lights, sirens, scent, and visual scarecrows, often lose effectiveness as predators habituate. It examines the behavioural ecology of neophobia an…

This overview synthesises research quantifying the economic burden of big-cat depredation on rural households, emphasising that losses small in aggregate can be devastating to individual families. It…