Abstract: Dorsal guard hairs of four living Indian species of the genus Panthera, viz. P. tigris, P. leo, P. pardus and P. uncia have been studied. It is found that the characters are somewhat overlapping, but identification of the species may be possible from the combination of characters.

Abstract: The Himalayan mountain range extends in a broad arc from Pakistan through India, Nepal, Bhutan and China. With elevations ranging from approximately 300 meters in the plains at the base of the mountains to the peaks well over 8,000 meters (Mt Everest 8,848 m). The Himalaya is the tallest and most complex of the world mountain regions (Striffler, 1985). The Himalaya can be divided into three physiographic zones. These includes the lower foothills usually describe as sub-Himalaya and represented by the Siwalik Hills which extend along most of the Himalaya with elevation seldom exceeding 1000 m. The second zone is the middle Himalaya also called Outer Himalaya or the lesser Himalaya with elevation ranges from 600 meters to over 3000 m. Interspersed within the middle zone are occasional larger to small valleys and river basins. The third zone is the great Himalaya or Inner Himalaya zone that covers higher mountain areas, the snow clad peaks and trans-Himalayan harsh climatic dry areas (HMG Nepal, 1977; Kaith, 1960). The glaciers and natural springs have drained the whole area and created a vast area as wetlands supplemented by different lake system in different elevations.

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.