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.
March marked the beginning of the spring season in Mongolia, and we are proud to welcome snow leopard expert Orjan back to our base camp in the South Gobi. We are looking forward to collaring more snow leopards in the month of April, but here is what our currently collared cats have been up too. …
Orjan returned to our Mongolian research base camp in early October, and he has already accomplished some incredible things. With the help of Kullu from our India program, Aztai was fitted with a replacement collar on October 15th. The new collar has been reprogrammed to send updates on Aztai’s locations more frequently, giving us the …
Ph.D. Candiate and field researcher extraordinaire Orjan shares an inside look into the lives of two of our collared cats: In mid-April, Aztai and Khashaa spent three days at the same place. The collar locations were spread out in a line and it seemed as if they had slowly, slowly moved down a steep mountainside. …
In early April, Snow Leopard Trust field researcher confirmed that Tsagaan, one of the snow leopards in our long term ecological study had passed away due to natural causes. Aztai, a rival male living adjacent to Tsagaan’s previous home range, has been seen exploring the territory that had previously belonged to Tsagaan at the complete …
Orjan recounts his first two incredible weeks collaring snow leopards at the base camp of our long-term study (Orjan is a Swedish PhD student working on this study): We have set a new collaring record and put out four GPS radio collars in 15 days. First we put a collar on a new female, called F5 for …
We recently got an update from Koustubh, our Regional Field Biologist, about the latest trek that the wild cat Aztai made in Mongolia: Couldn’t resist the temptation of sharing this exciting episode of Mr. Aztai and his long walk. He seems to be fond of taking these long walks almost periodically, though the frequency is …
Dear blog readers, thanks for a great year. Here is an end-of-the-year update about our long-term snow leopard study in the South Gobi, Mongolia. November marked one of the coldest months in South Gobi with mercury dipping to abysmal limits. Field work became increasingly difficult and our camp remained under thick cover of snow. Despite …
The past several weeks have had many of our scientists on their toes. Just a few weeks after Zara ventured into the “badlands,” it was Aztai’s turn. After taking off from his home range on what seemed like one of his usual forays, he spent two days around a hillock right in the middle of …
(Map Courtesy of SLT/Panthera) We are happy to announce that the collars worn by Aztai, Khavar and Zaraa continue to work fabulously, uploading up to 80% of the scheduled locations; those of Shonkhor, Tsagaan, Saikhan and Devekh seem to be under-performing. The good news is that Orjan will be returning to the field shortly (he …
