by Vasudevan Sridharan on
5 November 2018
A six-year study of leopards in
the wildlife-rich southern Indian state of Karnataka, using grids of
motion-sensor camera traps across the state, suggests the big cats are thriving
in a variety of habitats and land uses.
The researchers’ use of
machine-learning algorithms significantly reduced the workload needed to
identify 363 individual leopards from the sample’s 1.5 million camera-trap
images. The figure indicates there are an estimated 2,500 leopards living in
Karnataka.
Although a forest department
official said the state was unlikely to expand its protected forests in the
foreseeable future, the researchers said such a policy was necessary for
leopard conservation, stressing that the proximity of natural landscapes to
agricultural fields allows leopards to use those unprotected areas.
An extensive study of the leopard
population in the wildlife-rich southern Indian state of Karnataka has
indicated that these big cats are thriving there, buoying hopes the species’
genetic pool is stable in the region.
Researchers from the Karnataka
Forest Department (KFD) and the independent research organization Nature
Conservation Foundation (NCF) jointly surveyed the cats in protected forests,
private lands, rocky outcrops and non-protected natural areas spanning a
diverse landscape covering roughly 27,000 square kilometers (10,400 square
miles). They used grids of motion-sensor camera traps to better understand
leopard distribution and habits in a variety of landscapes.
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