Researcher Saloni Bhatia has examined the role of religion on people’s attitudes toward snow leopards and wolves. She didn’t find significant differences between Muslims’ and Buddhists’ tolerance for these predators. Overall, the conservation impact of religion seems to be limited – but not insignificant.
UN Development Programme and the Government of Kyrgyzstan agree on US$ 1m GEF-financed global project to conserve snow leopards. The Snow Leopard Trust will be the implementing agency of the project.
A new study shows that climate change is threatening to disrupt or fragment large parts of the snow leopard’s mountain habitat. There are three core habitat zones that appear to have the potential to be safe refugia for the species though.
Researchers have captured the elusive big cat on camera in Shamshy, a former hunting concession that has been co-managed as a Wildlife Sanctuary by the Kyrgyz government and conservationists since 2015.
Amarsaikhan is a herder in the Tost Mountains of Mongolia. Everyone here calls him Amara. He has spent his entire life living alongside the elusive snow leopard – not seeing the cat very often, but feeling its presence much more frequently than he’d have cared for. Every year, snow leopards killed several of his horses and fawns—an expense he and his community could hardly withstand. Amara not only feared these cats – “to be honest, I think I hated them”, he says. On several occasions, he attempted to kill snow leopards that had come near his camp. Luckily, he never succeeded.
Snow leopards are notoriously difficult to monitor, in part because they reside in remote areas with unfriendly terrain. But they aren’t the only ones who live there.
Snow Leopard Trust researcher Örjan Johansson recently published a groundbreaking study where he could show that most Protected Areas in the cats’ habitat are too small to hold viable snow leopard populations. In this article, he explains how he and his team calculated snow leopard home ranges using data from cats they tracked with GPS collars.
40% of Protected Areas in Asia Are Unable to Sustain Even One Pair of Breeding Snow Leopards
Ajay Bijoor, a project associate in our India team, has written a wonderful article about his experiences with the management of feral dogs in the Transhimalayan landscape of Spiti, India. We’re reposting it here with the kind permission of Ajay and Current Conservation magazine.
An expert meeting held in Urumqi highlighted the enormous progress that’s been made in snow leopard research and conservation in China over the past years. Shan Shui, Snow Leopard Trust and Panthera have worked in partnership in China since 2009.
