Abstract: Snow leopards occur in Asia�s high mountain ranges of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, Pamir, Tien Shan, Kunlun, Altai and Sayan. In all the 12 countries where they occur, snow leopards face intensifying threats to their survival, including habitat fragmentation and degradation due to increasing human populations, mining and developmental projects, poaching and illegal wildlife trade, weak law enforcement, inadequate involvement of local people in conservation efforts, and depletion of natural prey populations due to hunting by people and overgrazing by livestock.
To address the urgent needs of conservation of the snow leopard and the sustainable development of mountain peoples, the Governments of snow leopard range countries came together and agreed to invest efforts to conserve snow leopards in 23 large landscapes across its range under the Global Snow Leopard Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP).
These landscapes where the snow leopards occur are inhabited by agro-pastoral and pastoral peoples who depend on well functioning ecosystems for ecosystem services, i.e., the benefits that humans derive from nature. Many threats that impact snow leopards also impact the well-being of people living in these landscapes. However, till date, there have been no studies that have attempted to quantify peoples� dependence on ecosystem services in snow leopard landscapes, or understand the impacts that alternate land-use decisions such as mining or infrastructure can have on the ecosystem services and on the local people who are dependent on them.
In this report, we provide the first assessment of the economic value of provisioning ecosystem services � the material goods from ecosystems � used by local people in five study sites from four GSLEP landscapes: Spiti Valley and Changtang region of Ladakh in India�s Hemis-Spiti Landscape, Gurez Valley in the Himalayan Landscape of Pakistan, Tost Nature Reserve in the South Gobi Landscape of Mongolia, and the Sarychat region in the Central Tien Shan Landscape of Kyrgyzstan. In study sites that had both pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, we estimated ecosystem services separately for the two production systems.The average value (± SE) of ecosystem services per household amongst the agro-pastoral
communities of Gurez Valley (4125 ± 190 USD/HH/yr) was 2.5 times the average local household income. In the agro-pastoral communities of Spiti Valley (3964 ± 334.8 USD/HH/yr) it was 3.6 times the average local household income, while it was 3.7 times amongst the agro-pastoral communities of Changtang (15083 ± 1656 USD/HH/yr). Amongst the pastoral communities, the value of ecosystem services used by households was several times higher than the average household income: it was 26.1 times amongst the pastoral communities of Changtang (79303 ± 9204 USD HH/yr), 38.7 times among communities in Tost Nature Reserve (150100 ± 13290 USD/HH/yr), and 7.4 times among the pastoral communities of Sarychat (25473 ± 5236 USD/HH/yr). It was lower, although still substantial at 0.6 times, for the downstream agro-pastoral communities living outside the landscape boundary in Sarychat (2094 ± 189 USD/HH/yr).
Our work reveals substantially high levels of dependence of local communities on ecosystem services provided by snow leopard landscapes of Asia. The estimated economic value of provisioning ecosystem services used by human households in these landscapes ranged from 0.6 to up to 40 times the local annual household incomes. This economic support that nature provides people is critical for humanity but remains hidden and unaccounted for. Land use change decisions, especially those that are damaging for nature and biodiversity, must start accounting for the value of ecosystem services in their cost-benefit analyses.

Abstract: Tibetan argali Ovis ammon hodgsoni and blue sheep Pseudois nayaur have almost completely overlapping distributions encompassing most of the Tibetan plateau and its margins. Such a sympatric distribution of related species with similar ecological requirements implies that there is some degree of resource partitioning. This may be accomplished on the basis of habitat and/or diet separation. This study evaluated such ecological separation on the basis of physical habitat partitioning by these two sympatric ungulates in Hemis High Altitude National Park, Ladakh, India, in an area where the argali established a small new population in 1978. Such separation was tested for
on the basis of expected difference between the species in their proximity to cliffs, associated with species-specific anti-predator behaviour. Tibetan argali selected habitats away from cliffs while blue sheep selected habitats close to cliffs. Blue sheep also selected steep slopes whereas argali selected gentle slopes. The two species did not differ
in their use of habitats in terms of elevation. They did, however, differ in their use of plant communities; blue sheep selected sub-shrub and grass-dominated communities whilst argali selected forb-dominated communities. We suggest that the two species coexist in this site as a result of the differential use of habitat associated with their
species-specific anti-predator strategies.

Abstract: The endangered snow leopard Panthera uncia occurs in human use landscapes in the mountains of South and Central Asia. Conservationists generally agree that snow leopards must be conserved through a land-sharing approach, rather than land-sparing in the form of strictly protected areas. Effective conservation through land-sharing requires a good understanding of how snow leopards respond to human use of the landscape. Snow leopard density is expected to show spatial variation within a landscape because of variation in the intensity of human use and the quality of habitat. However, snow leopards have been difficult to enumerate and monitor. Variation in the density of snow leopards remains undocumented, and the impact of human use on their populations is poorly understood. We examined spatial variation in snow leopard density in Spiti Valley, an important snow leopard landscape in India, via spatially explicit capture recapture analysis of camera trap data. We camera trapped an area encompassing a minimum convex polygon of 953 km . We estimated an overall density of 0.49 (95% CI: 0.39-0.73) adult snow leopards per 100 km . Using AIC, our best model showed the density of snow leopards to depend on wild prey density, movement about activity centres to depend on altitude, and the expected number of encounters at the activity centre to depend on topography. Models that also used livestock biomass as a density covariate ranked second, but the effect of livestock was weak. Our results highlight the importance of maintaining high density pockets of wild prey populations in multiple use landscapes to enhance snow leopard conservation.

Abstract: Human–wildlife conflict arising from livestock-losses to large carnivores is an important challenge faced by conservation. Theory of prey–predator interactions suggests that revival of wild prey populations can reduce predator’s dependence on livestock in multiple-use landscapes. We explore whether 10-years of conservation efforts to revive wild prey could reduce snow leopard’s Panthera uncia consumption of livestock in the coupled human-and-natural Trans-Himalayan ecosystem of northern India. Starting in 2001, concerted conservation efforts at one site (intervention) attempted recovery of wild- prey populations by creating livestock-free reserves, accompanied with other incentives (e.g. insurance, vigilant herding). Another site, 50km away, was monitored as status quo without any interventions. Prey remains in snow leopard scats were examined periodically at five-year intervals between 2002 and 2012 to determine any temporal shift in diet at both sites to evaluate the effectiveness of conservation interventions. Consumption of livestock increased at the status quo site, while it decreased at the intervention-site. At the intervention-site, livestock-consumption reduced during 2002–2007 (by 17%, p = 0.06); this effect was sustained during the next five-year interval, and it was accompanied by a persistent increase in wild prey populations. Here we also noted increased predator populations, likely due to immigration into the study area. Despite the increase in the predator population, there was no increase in livestock-consumption. In contrast, under status quo, dependence on livestock increased during both five-year intervals (by 7%, p=0.08, and by 16%, p=0.01, respectively). These contrasts between the trajectories of the two sites suggest that livestock-loss can potentially be reduced through the revival of wild prey. Further, accommodating counter-factual scenarios may be an important step to infer whether conservation efforts achieve their targets, or not.