🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

A survey of how the Canada lynx's large, well-furred feet give it an advantage hunting snowshoe hares in deep, soft snow, and how snow conditions structure its competition with other predators. The ly…

When GPS collars replaced VHF on snow leopards, they revealed home ranges dramatically larger than earlier studies had suggested, and this overview examines why. VHF tracking in such rugged, remote te…

Beyond mapping where snow leopards go, collar-mounted activity sensors and fix-timing data reveal when they are active, and this overview synthesizes what telemetry shows about their diel and seasonal…

Predator movement is often shaped by the movements of prey, and this overview examines how snow leopard ranging relates to the distribution and movements of wild ungulates such as ibex, argali, and bl…

This overview examines human-snow leopard conflict on the Mongolian steppe and mountains, where mobile pastoralists herding goats, sheep, yaks, and horses overlap with snow leopards across vast rangel…

Across the high mountains of Asia, snow leopards and pastoralists overlap, and depredation on livestock drives conflict central to the cat's conservation. This overview synthesizes studies on the patt…

Snow leopards are strongly associated with broken, cliffy terrain, and this overview examines how their fine-scale movement follows ridgelines, cliff bases, and rugged features that provide stalking c…

Across the high mountains of Asia, snow leopards prey on domestic sheep, goats, and yaks, creating conflict with herding communities whose livelihoods depend on their animals. This overview surveys re…

This overview synthesizes telemetry evidence on how snow leopards disperse across the vast, rugged mountain systems of Central and South Asia. GPS-collared individuals, especially subadults, have unde…

This survey reviews how snow leopard species distribution models are run across contrasting greenhouse-gas emissions pathways to bracket the range of plausible future habitat. It explains how downscal…

Genetic studies of snow leopards have sought to characterize diversity and structure across a range spanning the Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau, and Central Asian mountains. This overview surveys research,…

Snow leopards inhabit the high mountains of Central and South Asia, selecting steep, broken terrain that aids stalking and escape. This overview synthesizes telemetry and survey studies showing that s…

GPS collaring has transformed understanding of snow leopard spatial ecology, revealing far larger home ranges than earlier studies suggested. This overview synthesizes tracking work, notably from Mong…

Applying the GPS-cluster method developed for pumas to snow leopards has begun to quantify how often these cats kill and what they eat, central questions for both ecology and conflict management. This…

This overview synthesises studies of snow leopard predation on livestock across the mountains of Central and South Asia, from Ladakh and Spiti to the Pamirs and Mongolia. It reviews patterns of loss,…

Snow leopards are killed and traded for their thick pelts and their bones, the latter increasingly drawn into the same markets that consume tiger and lion bone. This overview surveys research on snow…

Snow leopards occur at naturally low density across a patchy, mountainous range, so climate-driven habitat fragmentation poses a real risk to gene flow. This overview surveys what noninvasive genetic…

Snow leopards inhabit some of the most remote, rugged, high-altitude terrain on Earth, making camera trapping one of the few feasible ways to estimate their numbers. This overview surveys the methods…

An overview of the snow leopard's dependence on a few wild mountain ungulates, chiefly blue sheep (bharal) and Siberian ibex, across the high ranges of Central Asia. These prey constitute the core of…

The arid mountains of Mongolia and the Gobi support an important snow leopard population at the dry edge of the species' climate envelope. This overview surveys how warming and changing precipitation…

Snow leopards depend heavily on mountain ungulates, especially blue sheep and ibex, across their range. This overview synthesizes diet studies showing that these wild caprids form the core of the snow…

Snow leopards inhabit steep mountain landscapes where conditions and prey shift markedly with elevation and season, and this overview examines how their movements track these changes. GPS telemetry ha…

Snow leopards range across roughly a dozen countries in the mountains of Central and South Asia, and their movements routinely cross international borders, making transboundary connectivity essential…

Snow leopards depend primarily on wild mountain ungulates such as blue sheep, ibex, argali, and marmots, and the health of these prey populations governs snow leopard numbers. This overview surveys re…

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…

A central theme in northern felid climate research is that the dividing line between Canada lynx and bobcat tracks snow conditions. This overview surveys the morphological and ecological basis for tha…

Canada lynx populations track the famous boom-bust cycle of snowshoe hare, so anything that alters hare dynamics propagates to the predator. This overview surveys how climate change may affect the har…

Whether sabertoothed cats lived socially is debated, and this overview reviews the lines of evidence, including healed injuries and the abundance of Smilodon in deposits such as tar seeps. Some argue…

Reintroducing big cats is as much a social undertaking as a biological one, since restored predators can prey on livestock and provoke fear, and local opposition can doom a project regardless of its e…

Felid sociality varies from the solitary tiger and most small cats to the group-living lion, and captive social management must respect these differences. This overview surveys research on housing cat…