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.
During the week of May 19, 2011, the young snow leopard Zaraa journeyed from our study area in the Tost Mountain region, 45 km. (~27 miles) north, across the Toson Bumba Mountain chain and all the way to another nearby chain called the Nemegt Mountains. What makes this northern trek so interesting is not the …
On April 12th the snow leopard Tsagaan was found dead. The uplinks from his GPS collar reported that he was stationary for four days. That was followed by seven days of radio silence. Orjan and the field team traveled to the site where he had been stationary to investigate and sadly found Tsagaan’s body. We …
One of the snow leopards in our long term ecological study, Tsagaan, recently died. We do not yet know the cause of his death but we are actively investigating and will post the findings as soon as we have them. Our field researcher Orjan explains. Two days ago I got an email saying that Tsagaan …
With Tsagaan fitted with an improved GPS tracking collar this past September, we have learned a remarkable amount of information on his recent whereabouts. His home range overlaps with that of Khashaa, Tenger and Zara (the three females in our research study) and his GPS locations show him visiting all of them more than once …
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 …
On September 18, 2010, our team caught up with Tsagaan, one of the large adult males we have been following for two years. Tsagaan was re-collared in March 2010. Unfortunately, his collar never switched on and we received no GPS locations from it during the last 8 months. Thankfully, this time around we were able …
Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia. These are his adventures… This morning at 6.10 the trap surveillance system woke me up with the LED light indicating a “trap alarm” blinking. Whew, that siren is loud enough to cause a heart attack! I’m …
As you can see on the map, Devekh’s movements these past two weeks have been remarkable (Devekh’s positions and trajectories are represented by the blue dots and lines). He has already given us quite a lot of data points to follow! Two weeks ago Devekh was heading Southeast toward the Tost Mountains. He continued this …
After several weeks of only hearing from one or two cats, we have recent location uplinks from four of the five collared snow leopards. Perhaps one of the most remarkable journeys depicted by this data is that of our newest cat we call M7 (blue). He is a real mover! He was fitted with his …
