Abstract: The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) inhabits a human-altered alpine landscape and is often tolerated by residents in regions where the dominant religion is Tibetan Buddhism, including in Qomolangma NNR on the northern side of the Chinese Himalayas. Despite these positive attitudes, many decades of rapid economic development and population growth can cause increasing disturbance to the snow leopards, altering their habitat use patterns and ultimately impacting their conservation. We adopted a dynamic landscape ecology perspective and used multi-scale technique and occupancy model to better understand snow leopard habitat use and coexistence with humans in an 825 km2 communal landscape. We ranked eight hypothetical models containing potential natural and anthropogenic drivers of habitat use and compared them between summer and winter seasons within a year. HABITAT was the optimal model in winter, whereas ANTHROPOGENIC INFLUENCE was the top ranking in summer (AICcw≤2). Overall, model performance was better in the winter than in the summer, suggesting that perhaps some latent summer covariates were not measured. Among the individual variables, terrain ruggedness strongly affected snow leopard habitat use in the winter, but not in the summer. Univariate modeling suggested snow leopards prefer to use rugged land in winter with a broad scale (4000 m focal radius) but with a lesser scale in summer (30 m); Snow leopards preferred habitat with a slope of 22° at a scale of 1000 m throughout both seasons, which is possibly correlated with prey occurrence. Furthermore, all covariates mentioned above showed inextricable ties with human activities (presence of settlements and grazing intensity). Our findings show that multiple sources of anthropogenic activity have complex connections with snow leopard habitat use, even under low human density when anthropogenic activities are sparsely distributed across a vast landscape. This study is also valuable for habitat use research in the future, especially regarding covariate selection for finite sample sizes in inaccessible terrain.

Abstract: Accurate assessments of the status of threatened species and their conservation
planning require reliable estimation of their global populations and robust monitoring
of local population trends. We assessed the adequacy and suitability of studies
in reliably estimating the global snow leopard (Panthera uncia) population. We
compiled a dataset of all the peer-reviewed published literature on snow leopard
population estimation. Metadata analysis showed estimates of snow leopard density
to be a negative exponential function of area, suggesting that study areas have generally
been too small for accurate density estimation, and sampling has often been
biased towards the best habitats. Published studies are restricted to six of the
12 range countries, covering only 0.3�0.9% of the presumed global range of the
species. Re-sampling of camera trap data from a relatively large study site
(c.1684 km2) showed that small-sized study areas together with a bias towards
good quality habitats in existing studies may have overestimated densities by up to
five times. We conclude that current information is biased and inadequate for generating
a reliable global population estimate of snow leopards. To develop a rigorous
and useful baseline and to avoid pitfalls, there is an urgent need for
(a) refinement of sampling and analytical protocols for population estimation of
snow leopards (b) agreement and coordinated use of standardized sampling protocols
amongst researchers and governments across the range, and (c) sampling
larger and under-represented areas of the snow leopard's global range.

Abstract: Discusses snow leopard distribution, ecology and conservation. Describes baiting (with a domestic goat) of a snow leopard and cub in a game reserve in Northern Pakistan. Incudes a description of the Leopard killing a goat, and observations over a week when the leopards were feeding on the goat baits.