🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Citizen science, from sighting and roadkill reporting to camera-trap and tracking projects, has become a powerful tool for monitoring urban felids and engaging the public in coexistence. This overview…

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…

Effective population size, the number of individuals genetically contributing to the next generation, is often far smaller than the census count and is a key predictor of how quickly a population lose…

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…

Wildlife corridors aim to reconnect fragmented cat populations, and genetics provides a direct test of whether they actually restore gene flow. This overview surveys how landscape and population genet…

In many cats, one sex disperses farther than the other, with males typically moving while females remain near their natal range, a pattern that leaves distinct genetic footprints. This overview survey…

Concentrated, predictable food in cities allows carnivores to meet their needs over smaller areas, contributing to the strikingly compressed home ranges documented in urban felids from leopards to pum…

For much of the twentieth century, cat classification rested on coat patterns, skull morphology, and geography, producing many poorly supported species and subspecies. This overview surveys how molecu…

Successful coexistence with urban felids depends as much on human attitudes, institutions and behaviour as on animal ecology. This overview synthesises social-science research on tolerance, risk perce…

Small or isolated cat populations frequently show the hallmarks of inbreeding depression, including reduced fertility, abnormal sperm, congenital defects, weakened immunity, and elevated juvenile mort…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Many felids become more strictly nocturnal as human activity increases, a pattern documented from Indian leopards to Californian bobcats and pumas. This overview synthesises camera-trap and telemetry…

Because most wild cats are elusive and difficult to capture, conservation geneticists increasingly rely on noninvasive samples such as scat, hair, and shed cells to obtain DNA without handling the ani…

Since the first lightly sequenced domestic cat genome, feline genomics has advanced to highly contiguous, chromosome-level assemblies for the domestic cat and an expanding set of wild species. This ov…

Roads fragment habitat, kill animals, and act as barriers to movement, making road ecology an important field for carnivore conservation. This overview surveys research on how roads affect big cats an…

Whole-genome sequencing reveals long stretches where an individual inherited identical segments from both parents, called runs of homozygosity, which accumulate with inbreeding and small population si…

The effectiveness of wildlife crossings depends partly on shielding animals from the light and noise of adjacent traffic, factors that can deter wary felids from using overpasses and underpasses. This…

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…

Wildlife crossings, from large vegetated overpasses to underpasses and culverts, are a primary engineering response to the roads that fragment felid populations near cities. This overview synthesises…

This landmark global meta-analysis showed that mammals across the world, including many carnivores, increase their nocturnal activity in response to human disturbance, becoming more active at night ev…

Gaynor KM, Hojnowski CE, Carter NH, Brashares JS · Science · 2018