🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Across most of their range, snow leopards share the landscape with pastoralist communities and their livestock rather than occupying pristine wilderness, and this overview examines what movement resea…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

The grain and extent at which a habitat model is built strongly influence its conclusions, a key consideration for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys how the choice of spatial resolution, from c…

This concluding overview synthesizes how the study of felid movement has evolved from sparse VHF triangulation to dense, multi-sensor biologging that captures not only where cats go but what they do a…

In endangered cats, individual temperament can determine reproductive success and welfare in managed-care programs. This overview surveys research extending the cheetah findings to other species, exam…

The Population Assessment of the World's Snow Leopards, known as PAWS, is a coordinated international effort to produce the first robust, range-wide estimate of snow leopard numbers using standardized…

This overview examines the hypothesis that the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding high-altitude Central Asia served as a cradle for the evolution of big cats and other cold-adapted carnivores. The discov…

Snow leopards are among the hardest big cats to count, and their global population remains poorly known. This overview synthesizes the methodological challenges of surveying a cryptic, low-density cat…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

The ability to roar distinguishes the genus Panthera and is tied to specialized anatomy of the larynx and a flexible hyoid apparatus, while smaller cats purr instead. This overview surveys the anatomi…

This overview surveys evidence on where and when the Panthera lineage, the genus that includes lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, and snow leopards, first arose. Molecular phylogenies place the diverge…

The snow leopard's relationships within the big cats were long uncertain, with some classifications isolating it in its own genus, Uncia. This overview explains how molecular phylogenetics resolved it…

Clouded leopards occupy a pivotal position as the sister group to the other big cats within the subfamily Pantherinae. This overview explains how molecular phylogenies consistently place the genus Neo…

The snow leopard belongs to the roaring lineage yet does not roar, and this overview reviews this exception and what it reveals. Although a member of Panthera, the snow leopard lacks the fully develop…

This overview surveys the evolutionary placement of the snow leopard within the big-cat genus Panthera and its relevance to fossil studies. Once isolated in its own genus, the snow leopard is now firm…

Sequencing the snow leopard genome alongside those of the tiger and lion advanced both big cat phylogenetics and the study of high-altitude adaptation. This overview surveys how the snow leopard genom…

In 2017 the snow leopard was reclassified on the IUCN Red List from Endangered to Vulnerable, a decision based on revised population estimates and the difficulty of demonstrating that numbers had fall…

Felid species span tropical jungles, deserts and high mountains, so meeting their thermal needs in captivity, often in non-native climates, is a real welfare challenge. This overview surveys thermal w…

Standard home ranges flatten an animal's world onto a two-dimensional map, but cats in mountainous terrain move through strongly three-dimensional space, and their ranges shift across seasons. This ov…

Rugged terrain creates a mosaic of microclimates, with cool, shaded, or moist pockets that can buffer species against regional warming, a key idea for montane cats. This overview surveys how topograph…

This overview synthesises research on whether wildlife-tourism revenue increases local tolerance for big cats by offsetting conflict costs. It reviews cases from jaguar tourism in the Pantanal, lion t…

Beyond distribution models, conservationists use structured climate vulnerability assessments that combine a species' exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity into an overall risk rating. This ove…

The snow leopard's range spans a dozen countries across the mountains of Asia, making transboundary cooperation essential. This overview synthesizes how conservation has shifted toward large, connecte…

Many large carnivore landscapes span international borders, prompting the creation of transboundary protected areas, sometimes called peace parks, that link reserves across countries into larger conse…

Snow leopard range spans twelve countries, so climate-resilient conservation requires cooperation across contested international borders. This overview reviews how initiatives like the Global Snow Leo…

Snow leopards routinely move across international borders, and this overview examines the practical and political challenges of tracking a cat whose range spans roughly a dozen countries with varying…

Climate warming is enabling herders to graze livestock at higher elevations and later into the season, expanding the overlap between domestic stock and snow leopard core habitat. This overview examine…

The roaring big cats and the purring small cats appear to form complementary groups, and this overview reviews the basis and limits of this divide. The flexible, incompletely ossified hyoid and specia…

This widely cited review synthesized the theory and practice of species distribution models (SDMs), the statistical tools that relate species occurrence to environmental predictors to map current and…

Elith, J., Leathwick, J.R. · Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · 2009

The big cats of the genus Panthera proved historically difficult to resolve because of rapid speciation and conflicting gene trees. This study assembled a large multilocus supermatrix and applied both…

Brian W. Davis, Gang Li, William J. Murphy · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010