Snow Leopard Survival Strategy - Panthera

leopards. This reflects the fact that the snow leopard
habitat faces pervasive human presence and use of natural
resources, and that the survival of the snow leopard
will ultimately be determined by attitudes of people who
share its habitat.
Understanding people’s attitudes entails an understanding
of their socio-economic status. By profiling
herder communities, who share habitat with the snow
leopard, cultural norms and attitudes can be assessed.
This means that field research projects, in addition to
ecology and natural history, need to include socio-economic
and anthropological research. Equally important
is the need for better understanding of snow leopard prey
populations – their distribution, population sizes, and
trends in populations over time.
Thus, across the range, the important information
needs for snow leopard conservation, in addition to research
aimed at better understanding the species ecology
and life history patterns, could be categorized as those of
(a) development and implementation of snow leopard
population estimation techniques, (b) a better understanding
of poaching pressures, (c) evaluation of the
attitudes and lifestyles of herder communities who share
the snow leopard’s habitat, and (d) better understanding
of prey species distributions and populations. Against
this background information, in the following section,
we highlight the points of difference region-wise.
Brief Description of Information
Needs and Potential Methods to
Address Them
R.1 Snow leopard distribution and “hot spots”:
The extent of snow leopard range across Asia has yet
to be adequately defined. Much of our estimates of existing
range are based on old data and GIS habitat-based
maps. Areas where snow leopards occur in high numbers
(hot spots) have not been identified in more than a few
parts of their range.
Potential Methods
• Use improved digital imagery that is now available to
refine existing model and map.
• Collect data on snow leopard sightings and sign to add
validity to model, collecting data within the SLN.
• Incorporate the large body of existing SLIMS data
into the model.
• Define areas where ground-truthing is still an important
need and carry out surveys.
Case Studies
Hunter, D. O. and R. J. Jackson. 1997. A range-wide
model of potential snow leopard habitat. Pages
51-56. in R. Jackson and A. Ahmad, editors Proceedings
of the Eighth International Snow Leopard Symposium,
Islamabad, Pakistan. International Snow
Leopard Trust, Seattle, WA.
Kobler, A. and M. Adamic, 2000. Identifying brown
bear habitat by a combined GIS and machine
learning method. Ecological Modelling 135:291-
300.
Maehr D. S. and J. A. Cox. 1995. Landscape features
and panthers in Florida. Conservation Biology
9(5):1008-1019.
McCarthy, T. M. 2000. Ecology and conservation
of snow leopards, Gobi brown bears, and wild
Bactrian camels in Mongolia. Ph.D. Dissertation.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. 133 pp.
Meegan, R. P. and D. S. Maehr. 2002. Landscape conservation
and regional planning for the Florida
panther. Southeastern Naturalist 1(3):217-232.
Ortega-Huerta, M. A. and K. E. Medley. 1999. Landscape
analysis of jaguar (Panthera onca) habitat
using sighting records in the Sierra de Tamaulipas,
Mexico. Environmental Conservation 26(4):
257-269.
Poyarkov, A.D., G.S. Samoylova and A.E. Subbotin.
2002. Evaluation of potential habitats of snow
leopard (Uncia uncia, Schreb.) in Altay-Khangay-Sayan
region and in the territory of Russian
Federation: GIS approach. Pages 148-158 in T. M.
McCarthy and J. Weltzin, editors Contributed Papers
to the Snow Leopard Survival Strategy Summit. International
Snow Leopard Trust, Seattle, Washington,
USA. Available at http://www.snowleopard.org/sln/
Stith, B. M. and N. S. Kumar. 2002. Spatial distributions
of tigers and prey: mapping and the use of
GIS. Pages 51 – 59 in Karanth, U. K. and J. Nichols,
editors. Monitoring tigers and their prey: A manual
for researchers, managers and conservationists in
Tropical Asia. Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bangalore,
India.
Woolf, A., C. K. Nielsen, T. Weber, and T. J. Gibbs-
Kieninger. 2002. Statewide modelling of bobcat,
Lynx rufus, habitat in Illinois, USA. Biological
Conservation 104:191-198.
R.2 Snow leopard migration and dispersal routes:
There is no information available on the extent to
which snow leopards migrate or disperse. This includes
cub/sub-adult dispersal away from natal range after
separation from the mother, and also any long-distance
travel by adults to new range. There is some indication
that snow leopards cross broad expanses of open lowland
between mountain ranges, however, it remains unclear
if this constitutes true migration, range expansion, or if
individual home-ranges are simply very large in marginal
habitat. In particular, no metapopulation system has been
suggested or shown for snow leopard population and this
requires more investigation since this would be critical in
designing conservation strategies.
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