🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview explains the reasoning the Cat Classification Task Force used to justify a major revision rather than incremental edits. It describes the decision rules adopted: recognize taxa only when…

This overview examines the deep evolutionary divergence within Felidae between the Felinae, the conical-toothed cats that include all living species, and the Machairodontinae, the extinct sabertooths.…

Subspecies inflation, the naming of many weakly supported geographic forms, has long plagued large carnivore taxonomy and complicates conservation. This overview explains how cats accumulated dozens o…

Modern classifications divide living cats into two subfamilies: Pantherinae (the roaring and big cats plus clouded leopards) and Felinae (most small and medium cats). This overview explains how that s…

Beyond static home ranges, researchers increasingly analyze how often and how regularly an animal returns to particular places, using revisitation and residence-time metrics. This overview describes t…

Programmable drop-off mechanisms release a collar from the animal at a scheduled time, sparing researchers a second risky capture and ensuring the device does not burden the cat indefinitely. This ove…

Roads impede wildlife not only by the physical danger of traffic but through sensory disturbance, and this overview examines how noise and artificial light can deter felids from approaching or crossin…

Every scientific cat name is anchored to a type specimen and governed by the rules of zoological nomenclature, which determine priority and validity. This overview explains how type skins and skulls i…

Quantifying how much two animals' ranges overlap is central to questions of territoriality, social structure, and resource competition, and this overview surveys the statistical indices used. Measures…

Cats are charismatic, wide-ranging, and conservation-sensitive, which makes their classification politically and scientifically fraught. This overview surveys the structural reasons taxonomy keeps shi…

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…

This overview surveys the emerging use of zinc isotopes in tooth enamel as a tool for reconstructing the trophic level and diet of fossil cats. Unlike collagen-based carbon and nitrogen analysis, whic…

This methodological review tackled two pervasive problems in GPS telemetry: locations are imprecise, and the probability of obtaining a fix at all depends on habitat, terrain, and canopy. Left uncorre…

Jacqueline L. Frair, John Fieberg, Mark Hebblewhite, Francesca Cagnacci, Nicholas J. DeCesare, Luca Pedrotti · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · 2010

Fleming and colleagues confronted a fundamental flaw in conventional kernel home-range estimation: it assumes location data are independent, yet modern GPS fixes are strongly autocorrelated in time, c…

Christen H. Fleming, William F. Fagan, Thomas Mueller, Kirk A. Olson, Peter Leimgruber, Justin M. Calabrese · Ecology · 2015

Although focused on small-mammal populations, this paper is widely credited with formalizing the minimum convex polygon as a measure of an animal's home range, the smallest convex shape enclosing all…

Carl O. Mohr · American Midland Naturalist · 1947

This influential review synthesized how rapidly improving tracking technology, from GPS tags to accelerometers and global data repositories, had turned animal movement into a powerful sensor network f…

Roland Kays, Margaret C. Crofoot, Walter Jetz, Martin Wikelski · Science · 2015

This influential book provides a comprehensive illustrated survey of the cat family and its extinct members, combining scientific synthesis with detailed reconstructions of fossil felids and their sab…

Alan Turner, Mauricio Anton · Columbia University Press · 1997

This landmark study used molecular genetics to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the cat family, resolving the relationships among all living felids and the timing of their diversification. The…

Warren E. Johnson, Eduardo Eizirik, Jill Pecon-Slattery, William J. Murphy, Agostinho Antunes, Emma Teeling, Stephen J. O'Brien · Science · 2006

This book by a leading felid morphologist examines how cat anatomy, ecology, and evolution inform their classification, and it predates but anticipates the integrative approach later formalized by the…

Kitchener AC · Comstock/Cornell University Press · 1991

This influential study reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of all living cat species and dated their diversification, establishing the framework of eight major felid lineages used ever since. Using…

Johnson WE, Eizirik E, Pecon-Slattery J, et al. · Science · 2006

This single-volume monograph covers every living cat species with accounts of taxonomy, morphology, ecology, and conservation, and it remains a touchstone for enthusiasts and researchers alike. This e…

Sunquist M, Sunquist F · University of Chicago Press · 2002

Fortin and colleagues used step-selection functions to show that elk in Yellowstone altered their fine-scale movement decisions in response to wolf predation risk, avoiding risky habitats such as open…

Daniel Fortin, Hawthorne L. Beyer, Mark S. Boyce, Douglas W. Smith, Thierry Duchesne, Julie S. Mao · Ecology · 2005

Calabrese, Fleming, and Gurarie released ctmm, an R package that treats telemetry data as samples from an underlying continuous-time movement process rather than a set of discrete points. The software…

Justin M. Calabrese, Christen H. Fleming, Eliezer Gurarie · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2016