Status of the snowleopard Panthera uncia in the Qilian Mountains, Gansu Province, China CHANGZH I ZHAN G,TEN G MA and DUIF ANG MA


Abstract Population density estimation is integral to the effective conservation and management of wildlife. The snow leopard Panthera uncia is categorized as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, and reliable information on its dens- ity is a prerequisite for its conservation and management. Little is known about the status of the snow leopard in the central and eastern Qilian Mountains, China. To address this, we estimated the population density of the snow leop- ard using a spatially explicit capture–recapture model based on camera trapping in Machang in the central and eastern Qilian Mountains during January–March 2019. We set up 40 camera traps and recorded 84 separate snow leopard captures over 3,024 trap-days. We identified 18 individual snow leopards and estimated their density to be 2.26/100 km2. Our study provides baseline information on the snow leop- ard and the first population estimate for the species in the central and eastern Qilian Mountains.


Keywords Camera trapping, China, density, Panthera uncia, Qilian Mountains, snow leopard, spatially explicit capture–recapture


Introduction


effects if their densities are reduced below certain thresh- olds, resulting in oversimplified ecosystems. The snow leopard Panthera uncia is considered a typical high moun- tain species of the arid and semi-arid areas of central Asia, with a range that includes 12 countries (McCarthy et al., 2017). It is a flagship species for the conservation of the high-altitude ecosystems of Asia. The species is widely but thinly distributed across a range of 1,776,000– 3,300,000 km2, with an estimated population size of 7,446–7,996 (McCarthy et al., 2017). However, there is a high level of uncertainty regarding these estimates as the remote and rugged mountain habitat of the species is a challenging environment in which to work. Although the


M CHANGZHI ZHANG (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0002-0008-0886,


amurtiger@126.com) and TENG MA School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), Wuhan 430000, China


DUIFANG MA Management Bureau of the Qilianshan National Nature Reserve, Zhangye, China


Received 1 November 2022. Revision requested 8 December 2022. Accepted 10 March 2023. First published online 10 August 2023.


any large carnivores are keystone species and any population decline can lead to dramatic ecological


snow leopard was recategorized from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2017, there is a consensus that snow leopard conservation efforts must be expanded and improved (Mallon & Jackson, 2017). The species is also listed in Appendix I of CITES, which means that international trade in the species and its body parts is illegal. The spec- ies faces numerous threats, including retaliatory killing for livestock predation, prey depletion, habitat degradation and loss as a result of developmental activities, poaching and global climate change (McCarthy et al., 2016, 2017; Mallon & Jackson, 2017; Aishwarya & Shekhar, 2018;Ale & Mishra, 2018; Suryawanshi et al., 2019;Li et al., 2020). Reliable information on population status is funda-


mental for effective conservation and management, and imperative for appropriate and effective conservation in- terventions. However, reliable population information can be difficult to obtain for carnivores because they often occur at low densities and may be nocturnal, elusive and range over relatively large areas (O’Connell et al., 2011). The situation is exacerbated for snow leopards because this species occurs principally in terrain that is difficult to access and at high elevations (Jackson et al., 2006). As a result, ,1% of the global distribution of the species had been adequately surveyed by 2018 (Suryawanshi et al., 2019), although efforts since then have expanded this co- verage (e.g. Suryawanshi et al., 2021). Assessments of the conservation status of the snow leopard in unsurveyed regions across its range are thus required to inform manage- ment decisions. A collaborate initiative, the Population Assessment of the World’s Snow Leopards, is currently being implemented by various organizations and govern- ment agencies. Recent habitat suitability and connectivity modelling


suggests that the entire span of the Qilian Mountains, Gansu Province, China, is more important to regional and global snow leopard conservation goals than was previously recognized (Li et al., 2020). Comparatively high estimated snow leopard densities (3.31 snow leopards/100 km2)in the western Qilian Mountains (Alexander et al., 2015) lend support to this. In this study we investigate the population status of the snowleopard in the previously unsurveyed cen- tral and eastern Qilian Mountains. With 32,038 km2 of po- tentially suitable, continuous, high-quality snow leopard habitat, these mountains are one of seven snow leopard landscape conservation units identified using maximum entropy modelling that previous expert knowledge-based planning did not identify (Li et al., 2020). We used camera traps and spatially explicit capture–recapture methods


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2024, 58(2), 255–260 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323000340


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