🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Climate change interacts with urbanisation to reshape the conditions felids face near cities, altering prey availability, water resources, heat exposure, fire regimes and the viability of corridors. T…

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…

Beyond P-22, several GPS-collared mountain lions in the National Park Service Santa Monica Mountains study have made rare, documented crossings of major freeways, including the 405 and 101, each event…

Feline immunodeficiency virus causes an AIDS-like syndrome in domestic cats yet has long been assumed benign in its wild hosts. This overview examines the evidence for and against that assumption, com…

From leopards in Mumbai to pumas in Los Angeles, caracals in Cape Town and fishing cats in Colombo, a remarkable diversity of felids inhabits the worlds cities, offering a comparative window on urban…

An overview of the long-running question of whether cougar predation adds to or merely substitutes for other deer mortality. If predation is compensatory, cats mainly take individuals that would have…

This overview examines the evolutionary relationships of Miracinonyx and the now well-supported conclusion that its cheetah-like form arose through convergence rather than common ancestry with the tru…

The cheetah and the extinct American cheetah independently evolved a slender, long-limbed body built for high-speed pursuit, a striking case of convergence given their separate ancestries within the p…

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…

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,…

An overview of cases where puma predation, though ecologically natural, poses risks to endangered or reintroduced prey populations. Examples include predation on woodland caribou, bighorn sheep, and r…

A survey of evidence that cougars can indirectly shape streamside plant communities by limiting and frightening deer. Where cougars are abundant, reduced and more wary deer browse cottonwoods, willows…

Dead-reckoning reconstructs an animal's detailed path between sparse GPS fixes by integrating heading from a magnetometer with speed inferred from acceleration, producing a continuous trajectory at su…

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…

Long-term study of pumas in the deserts of the American Southwest illuminated how these cats persist in arid mountains and how their populations function as sources and sinks. This overview synthesize…

As conservation efforts seek to rewild felids and support natural range expansion, disease becomes a critical consideration. This overview surveys the disease dimensions of rewilding and range recover…

Dispersal is central to puma ecology, with young males traveling long distances to establish ranges while females often settle nearer their natal areas. This overview synthesizes telemetry and genetic…

Juvenile cougar dispersal, the long-distance movements by which young animals find new territories and exchange genes, is sharply constrained in landscapes fragmented by roads and development around s…

Habitat corridors that allow subadult cats to move between core areas are central to maintaining gene flow and demographic exchange in fragmented landscapes. This overview surveys research on how conn…

The dispersal phase is among the most dangerous periods in a young cat's life, as subadults move through unfamiliar and often occupied or human-dominated terrain. This overview surveys evidence that d…

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.…

Drought reverberates through ecosystems by reducing vegetation, prey body condition, and reproduction, with cascading effects on the predators that depend on them. This overview surveys how droughts o…

In western North America, puma populations track deer and other ungulate prey whose abundance and condition fluctuate with drought. This overview surveys how dry years reduce forage, lower prey recrui…

Drought intensifies competition between people and predators for scarce water, forage, and livestock, often heightening human-wildlife conflict. This overview surveys how dry periods push cats toward…

To stretch limited battery life, modern collars use duty cycling, turning sensors and the GPS receiver on only at chosen times, and adaptive schedules that intensify sampling when it matters most. Thi…

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…

A survey of how the kills of large cats function as a form of ecosystem engineering, structuring scavenger communities, nutrient flow and local biodiversity. Because predators such as pumas, leopards…

Living near people imposes hidden energetic costs on felids through interrupted hunting, abandoned kills, vigilance, detours around development and altered activity timing. This overview synthesises a…

Beyond gradual trends, extreme events, severe droughts, heatwaves, floods, and harsh winters, can cause abrupt declines in cat populations or their prey. This overview surveys documented cases where e…