Explore the vast range of titles available.

Head into the unknown with explorer Steve Backshall as he journeys to the world's last unexplored places and faces challenges around the globe, encountering extraordinary wildlife and meeting remarkable people along the way. Steve and the team head to the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan to find one of the world's most endangered big cats - the snow leopard. If they can find evidence of a breeding population in the remote and almost inaccessible Djangart valley, they hope to persuade the government of Kyrgyzstan to turn the Djangart valley into a protected nature reserve.

Accurate information about the diet of large carnivores that are elusive and inhabit inaccessible terrain, is required to properly design conservation strategies. Predation on livestock and retaliatory killing of predators have become serious issues throughout the range of the snow leopard. Several feeding ecology studies of snow leopards have been conducted using classical approaches. These techniques have inherent limitations in their ability to properly identify both snow leopard feces and prey taxa. To examine the frequency of livestock prey and nearly-threatened argali in the diet of the snow leopard, we employed the recently developed DNA-based diet approach to study a snow leopard population located in the Tost Mountains, South Gobi, Mongolia. After DNA was extracted from the feces, a region of ∼100 bp long from mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene was amplified, making use of universal primers for vertebrates and a blocking oligonucleotide specific to snow leopard DNA. The amplicons were then sequenced using a next-generation sequencing platform. We observed a total of five different prey items from 81 fecal samples. Siberian ibex predominated the diet (in 70.4% of the feces), followed by domestic goat (17.3%) and argali sheep (8.6%). The major part of the diet was comprised of large ungulates (in 98.8% of the feces) including wild ungulates (79%) and domestic livestock (19.7%). The findings of the present study will help to understand the feeding ecology of the snow leopard, as well as to address the conservation and management issues pertaining to this wild cat.

Many of our planet’s big cat species face devastating declines from climate change, habitat destruction and poaching; meet those working to preserve some of the most threatened.

The snow leopard is one of earth's most elusive creatures. When a photographer and an adventurer traverse the Tibetan Plateau in search of the rare cat, they encounter a majestic and dazzling array of wildlife, seldom seen by human eyes.

雪豹(Panthera uncia)的皮毛具有较强的隐蔽性,红外相机监测图像中雪豹和背景较为相似,而且监测图像中雪豹的尺寸大小不一,为了提升雪豹检测的准确率,采用3个不同的检测器进行级联,在特征提取网络中引入特征金字塔结构改进Cascade R-CNN模型实现了雪豹的自动检测。以项目组采集的雪豹监测图像为数据集的评估结果表明,无论是白天/黑夜图像,还是多种不同尺寸雪豹同时出现的图像,该方法都可以较好地实现雪豹的识别及定位,平均准确率达93.0%,对比Faster R-CNN和SSD-300(Single Shot MultiBox Detector 300)分别提升了9.0%和3.9%。将该模型应用于雪豹监测图像的自动筛选,可以极大地提高工作效率。

Long recognized as a threat to wildlife, particularly for large carnivores, livestock grazing in protected areas can potentially undermine conservation objectives. The interspecific interactions among livestock, snow leopards (Panthera uncia), and their wild prey in fragile Asian highland ecosystems have been a subject of debate. We strategically deployed 164 camera traps in the Wolong National Nature Reserve to systematically investigate the activities of snow leopards, their primary wild ungulate prey species, and free‐ranging livestock. We found that snow leopard habitat use was influenced by both wild prey and livestock. Blue sheep served as the main wild prey that spatially attracted snow leopards and coexisted with yaks while free‐ranging yaks significantly restricted snow leopard habitat use both temporally and spatially. This study challenges the conventional understanding that livestock indirectly impacts large carnivores by competing with and displacing wild prey. Our findings highlight that free‐ranging yaks within the alpine canyon terrain could directly limit snow leopard habitat use, suggesting a potential risk of grazing in reducing apex predator distribution and jeopardizing their populations. Consequently, managing their coexistence in shared habitats requires a more nuanced approach. Furthermore, our research underscores the importance of further research efforts aimed at enhancing our comprehension of the complex interplay within animal communities and ecosystems. This knowledge will contribute to the development of informed, evidence‐based conservation strategies and policies. We explored the interspecific relations between snow leopard, blue sheep, and free‐ranging livestock. It is shown that the populations of three species reached coexistence through temporal, spatial, or other adaptations of their activities, suggesting the potential risk of grazing in reducing snow leopard distribution.

The breakthrough - announced on 6 March by the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas - is an early technical success in Colossal's high-profile effort to engineer elephants with woolly mammoth traits. Endangered species In 2011, Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and her colleagues created iPS cells from a northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) and a monkey called a drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus), the first such cells from endangered animals2. Embryonic-like stem cells have since been made from a menagerie of threatened species, including snow leopards (Panthera uncia)3, Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii)4 and Japanese ptarmigans (Lagopus muta japónica)5.

The Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain ranges in Pakistan's northern areas are a natural habitat of the snow leopard ( syn. ) but the ecological studies on this animal are scarce since it is human shy by nature and lives in difficult mountainous tracts. The pilot study is conducted to exploit the genetic diversity and population structure of the snow leopard in this selected natural habitat of the member of the wildcat family in Pakistan. About 50 putative scat samples of snow leopard from five localities of Gilgit-Baltistan (Pakistan) along with a control sample of zoo maintained male snow leopard were collected for comparison. Significant quality and quantity of genomic DNA was extracted from scat samples using combined Zhang-phenol-chloroform method and successful amplification of cytochrome c oxidase I gene (190 bp) using mini-barcode primers, seven simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers and Y-linked AMELY gene (200 bp) was done. Cytochrome c oxidase I gene sequencing suggested that 33/50 (66%) scat samples were of snow leopard. AMELY primer suggested that out of 33 amplified samples, 21 (63.63%) scats were from male and 12 (36.36%) from female leopards. Through successful amplification of DNA of 25 out of 33 (75.75%) scat samples using SSR markers, a total of 68 alleles on seven SSR loci were identified, showing low heterozygosity, while high gene flow between population. The low gene flow rate among the population results in low genetic diversity causing decreased diversification. This affects the adaptability to climatic changes, thus ultimately resulting in decreased population size of the species.

Large carnivores occur in human‐dominated landscapes globally, albeit with varying consequences for the animals and people involved. This lies in stark contrast to the belief that Protected Areas are the only means to conserve large carnivores, and in particular big cats. We aimed to assess snow leopard density and distribution in non‐protected landscapes within Jammu and Kashmir, India. Using detection/non‐detection records from 193 camera traps, we developed an ensemble species distribution model to identify important areas for snow leopard occurrence across J&K. To estimate population size in a non‐protected, multi‐use landscape, we applied spatially explicit capture–recapture (SECR) models to data from 47 camera traps deployed across five valleys covering 989 km2 in Paddar, Kishtwar Himalaya. Alongside, we conducted focus group discussions with local communities to understand land‐use practices. The distribution model predicted high snow leopard suitability across the eastern region of Jammu and Kashmir, that is, the Kishtwar Himalaya. We estimated 0.35 (0.11–1.06) snow leopards100 km−2 with a realized abundance of 6 (6–11) individuals in Paddar. Land uses were local and migratory livestock grazing, religious pilgrimages and medicinal plant and fodder collection. Snow leopard were rarely seen by people, but livestock owners and herders faced livestock losses to snow leopards. Practical implication. Our approach provides the first integrated assessment of snow leopard occurrence in J&K, and density and land use in Paddar, offering insights for conservation planning outside formally protected areas. This underscores the urgent need to set up community‐based conservation interventions as we confirm that the Kishtwar Himalaya, irrespective of protection status, needs to be managed as a snow leopard landscape. Our study adds to the evidence that snow leopards need landscape‐level conservation strategies, rather than relying solely on Protected Areas. We assess the population of snow leopards in the multi‐use region of Paddar in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Alongside we also investigate local land uses and estimate snow leopard distribution across Jammu and Kashmir. This study adds to the evidence that big cats, especially snow leopards, need landscape‐level conservation strategies, rather than solely concentrating on Protected Areas.