<i>Where</i> and <i>How many</i>? The status of snow leopard (<i>Panthera uncia</i>) density surveys and knowledge gaps in China

Abstract

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) is widely distributed across remote and difficult-to-traverse 中国雪豹调查研究与保护专题terrains. Thus, the main obstacle to snow leopard research is the lack of baseline data. Here, we retrieved all articles published in either Chinese or English that studied snow leopards in China from 1980 to 2018, and from these we identified 35 papers that reported on the distribution or density of snow leopards in their results sections. Eighteen of these included a density estimation. Additionally, we obtained unpublished snow leopard density survey data from 28 different areas. On this basis, we assessed the status of snow leopard surveys and data-deficient areas in each province. We found that the two areas most lacking data for the snow leopard distribution surveys exist in the West Tianshan Mountains bordering Kyrgyzstan and the Gangdisi-Nyenchenthanglha Mountains and the Himalayas in southern Tibet. Relative to the total area of China's snow leopard habitat, density surveys still only cover a small fraction of their habitat (1.7%), so these aggregation efforts are far from complete. Finally, because existing density surveys tend to explore relatively good snow leopard habitats, we must continue to expand survey efforts, especially across data-deficient areas.