New hope for the survival of the Amur leopard in China.

Guangshun Jiang,Zhilin Li,Quanhua Shi,Youde Chang,Mark Hebblewhite,Jianzhang Ma,Minghai Zhang,Yury Darman,Dale G Miquelle,Jinzhe Qi,Guiming Wang,Xue Zhang,Jiayin Gu

doi:10.1038/srep15475

Guangshun Jiang, Zhilin Li + Show 11 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep15475

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Abstract

Natural range loss limits the population growth of Asian big cats and may determine their survival. Over the past decade, we collected occurrence data of the critically endangered Amur leopard worldwide and developed a distribution model of the leopard’s historical range in northeastern China over the past decade. We were interested to explore how much current range area exists, learn what factors limit their spatial distribution, determine the population size and estimate the extent of potential habitat. Our results identify 48,252 km2 of current range and 21,173.7 km2 of suitable habitat patches and these patches may support 195.1 individuals. We found that prey presence drives leopard distribution, that leopard density exhibits a negative response to tiger occurrence and that the largest habitat patch connects with 5,200 km2of Russian current range. These insights provide a deeper understanding of the means by which endangered predators might be saved and survival prospects for the Amur leopard not only in China, but also through imperative conservation cooperation internationally.

Highlights

Jilin during the winter of 2011–201210, and an additional 5 ~ 7 leopards identified in another local survey in the southern Laoyeling Mountains of Heilongjiang during the winter survey of 2012–2013
Using training and test data we found that the Amur leopard model has maximum of sum of area under curve (AUC) values at the 400 m scale (Extended Data Fig. 7), so we obtained occurrence probability layers of Amur tiger and prey at this scale (Extended Data Fig. 8–13), determining suitable habitat areas by cutoff points based on the maximum sum of model sensitivity and specificity (Extended Data Table 3)[14]
The Amur Heilong Database shows that the Amur leopard only occupies 2.96% of its historical range and most experts predict that there is no hope of natural recovery for the subspecies because of its very small population size, limited available habitat and restricted present range[7,9]

Summary

Introduction

Tiger and four ungulates, i.e., roe deer (Capreolus pygargus), red deer (Cervus elaphus), sika deer (Cervus nippon) and wild boar (Sus scrofa), as individual species and combined, were determined at different scales and used to obtain their habitat suitability based on bias files correction and habitat factors[13]. Based on the Amur leopard occurrence probability layer, we determined suitable patches > 500 km[2] (i.e., large patch) and > 100 km[2] in current and potential regions and assessed connectivity among the 7 large patches (i.e., 3 patches are in the leopard’s current range and 4 in its potential range) (Fig. 4). We found that largest suitable patch in the current region is connected with Russian habitat patches and may be an important source site for Amur leopard recovery in these two countries

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