The snow leopard in China 259
being located outside nature reserves in anthropogenic areas (villages, agricultural lands, roads and development sites) even though snow leopards might have predated on live- stock in such locations in our study area. The snow leopard is an apex predator of high-altitude
mountain ecosystems and has the potential to be an iconic indicator of the ecological condition of such settings. Effective snow leopard conservation management requires that snow leopard density estimates are both accurate and precise, and determined with sufficient frequency to facil- itate informed decision-making. In this study we estimat- ed snow leopard density using a spatially explicit capture– recapture model based on camera trapping, providing a reliable baseline against which the trajectory of this pop- ulation can be monitored following any future conserva- tion interventions. Improvements in any future studies, such as increasing camera-trap capture rate and improv- ing photograph quality, would be beneficial. We also rec- ommend that robust study designs using optimization and simulation tools (Dupont et al., 2020; Durbach et al., 2020) are adopted.
Acknowledgements This study was funded by WWF China. We thank the staff of Qilianshan National Nature Reserve, especially K.T. Liao and Y.P. Chen for their support; and two anonymous re- viewers for their critiques.
Author contributions Material development: CZ; fieldwork: CZ, DM; data preparation and analysis: CZ; study design: TM; writing: CZ; revision: TM, DM.
Conflicts of interest None.
Ethical standards This research abided by the Oryx guidelines on ethical standards and the research did not involve any human subjects, experimentation with animals and/or collection of specimens.
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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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