🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

As climate change shifts the distribution of suitable habitat, connectivity must allow species to track those changes by moving to newly suitable areas, adding a dynamic dimension to corridor planning…

Genetic tools have become central to small-cat conservation, and this overview reviews their applications. Non-invasive sampling of scats and hair allows researchers to confirm the presence of cryptic…

The critically endangered Iberian lynx has been the focus of intensive conservation medicine within recovery programs combining captive breeding, reintroduction, and disease management. Veterinary con…

For tiny, isolated felid populations, infectious disease can pose an extinction-level threat that compounds genetic and demographic vulnerabilities. This overview surveys how disease drives extinction…

When cats are reintroduced to restore populations, ongoing disease monitoring is essential to detect outbreaks early and protect the investment in recovery. This overview surveys the post-release heal…

Moving wild cats for reintroduction or genetic management carries the danger of moving pathogens with them, making disease risk assessment a core part of conservation translocations. This overview sur…

The Canada lynx and bobcat are North American members of the lynx lineage whose relationships and occasional hybridization illuminate felid speciation. This overview examines their divergence, with mo…

Free-roaming and feral domestic cats, vastly more numerous than their wild relatives, act as a reservoir for pathogens that can spill into endangered felids. This overview surveys the suite of disease…

The IUCN Red List provides the standard framework for assessing the extinction risk of the world's cats, guiding conservation priorities and tracking changes in status over time. This overview surveys…

Feline leukemia virus is fundamentally a domestic-cat pathogen, yet it has crossed into endangered wild felids with lethal consequences. This overview surveys documented and suspected spillover events…

Climate is intensifying disturbance in boreal and montane forests through larger wildfires and bark-beetle outbreaks, reshaping the dense conifer stands and snow conditions Canada lynx and snowshoe ha…

A survey of how Holling's functional-response framework is applied to cats to describe how their per-capita kill rate changes with prey density. Most felids are thought to show a saturating Type II re…

Small populations accumulate deleterious mutations, the genetic load, but sustained inbreeding can also expose and remove the most harmful recessive variants through a process called purging. This ove…

Having passed through a severe bottleneck, the Iberian lynx carries reduced genetic diversity, which compounds its vulnerability to climate and disease stress. This overview surveys how genetic monito…

Genomic erosion refers to the cumulative loss of genetic diversity and accumulation of harmful variation that accompanies population decline, and cats provide some of its clearest examples. This overv…

When feline leukemia virus appears in an endangered wild felid, tracing its origin is crucial for management. This overview surveys how molecular phylogenetics is used to attribute wild FeLV infection…

The Iberian lynx became the world's most endangered cat, falling to fewer than one hundred individuals before an intensive recovery effort. This overview surveys genomic studies revealing that the spe…

Gestation in felids scales broadly with body size, ranging from roughly two months in small cats to around three and a half months in the largest species. This overview compiles comparative data on pr…

Hybridization between cat species, both in captivity and occasionally in the wild, has played a larger role in felid evolution than once appreciated. This overview surveys the spectrum from ancient in…

Effective conservation increasingly requires integrating disease information alongside genetic, demographic and habitat data in planning for felids. This overview surveys how disease data are incorpor…

A survey of the lethal interactions between cats and dogs that share prey and space, a major structuring force in carnivore communities. Lions and hyenas kill wild dogs and cheetahs; pumas and coyotes…

Lynx populations in the contiguous United States, in the Rockies, Cascades, Great Lakes region, and New England, sit at the warm, dry edge of the species' range and are unusually exposed to climate-dr…

Landscape genetics links genetic patterns to the features of the terrain between populations, a toolkit central to studying fragmentation in cats. This overview surveys the methods, from microsatellit…

An overview of the competitive relationship between Canada lynx and coyotes, both of which prey on snowshoe hares across much of the boreal forest. During hare highs the two predators overlap heavily…

If suitable climate space for Canada lynx moves northward, populations can only follow it through connected habitat, making latitudinal corridors a conservation priority. This overview surveys how con…

After a virulent feline leukemia virus outbreak struck Donana Iberian lynx, disease management became central to recovery of the species. This overview synthesizes the response and ongoing strategy: r…

Iberian lynx recovery has relied on metapopulation thinking, managing a set of connected subpopulations to spread risk and sustain gene flow. This overview surveys how population viability analyses in…

Tracking whether Iberian lynx recovery is keeping pace with environmental change requires sustained, standardized monitoring of cats, rabbits, and habitat. This overview surveys the census methods, ca…

Where the ranges of the bobcat and the Canada lynx overlap along the southern edge of the lynx distribution, the two species occasionally hybridize, producing animals sometimes called blynx. This over…

An overview of how Canada lynx populations rise and fall in response to snowshoe hare abundance, the numerical-response half of the famous cycle. As hares increase, lynx reproduction and kitten surviv…