Protecting Snow Leopards

Thank you for donating to our Protecting Snow Leopards project. Your support helps to fund The Snow Leopard Trust (SLT), the ground-based conservation partners that David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation supports and who work to protect the elusive snow leopard in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia.

SLT has recently published a peer-reviewed paper revealing that the samples used in previous studies of snow leopard populations have possibly been too small to be accurate. In fact, the paper highlights that historically, sampling has often been biased towards the best habitats.

“There have been lots of questions about how many snow leopards there may be in the world lately, and a lot of debate about how little we really know,” says Snow Leopard Trust ecologist Dr. Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, the lead author of the new study. “So we decided to look into this question in more detail. We wanted to understand how much useful data on snow leopard populations really exists, and how reliable it is.”

This practical application of their research is vital – they came to the conclusion the majority of existing studies about snow leopard populations are biased toward the best habitats and cover areas that are too small to be representative of the landscapes where these cats are found and cannot be used to help determine the global population.

Why is this type of bias in population studies a problem for snow leopard conservation?

“The snow leopard’s global range is huge, and less than 1% of it has ever been surveyed with solid scientific methods to estimate how many cats there are. These studies are a really small snapshot of reality. But they’re also all we’ve got right now. People often ask how many snow leopards there may be in the world, and the best answer we can give them based on the very limited data we have is somewhere between 3,500 to perhaps 8,000, but we don’t really know. Now, if there is any bias in our data, our picture of reality will be very skewed! At the same time, major conservation decisions are being made on the basis of this data – decisions that will impact snow leopards and their habitat for generations. What if there are actually fewer snow leopards than we think because most existing studies are biased towards high-density areas that don’t accurately reflect reality? It’s impossible to say for sure, but our research shows it’s at the very least a real concern. We can’t afford to be wrong.” – From the SLT website.

SLT has worked tirelessly for many years and is a global leader in monitoring techniques of these elusive populations. Accurate data is essential to not only understand the species and how they best thrive and in what conditions but also in order to determine the threats they face from external factors such as the illegal wildlife trade. The future of the snow leopard hangs in the balance and rigorous scientific data is the key to better understand the impacts of trade, poaching and environmental changes on global snow leopard populations.

DSWF is proud to also support the Snow Leopard Trust by focusing on educational and community based conservation outputs.

Links:

• Our work on snow leopards