Abundance and threats to the survival of the snow leopard – a review

Abstract

Snow leopard (Panthera uncia) is an endangered species and its population size is steadily declining. This review attempts to introduce and analyse the main factors threatening its survival in each of the countries in which it occurs: China, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. To conserve the remaining snow leopard populations, it is necessary to determine where it occurs in the various areas. Here, recent data on its worldwide distribution are presented. Snow leopard has a very secretive lifestyle, which makes it difficult to estimate its abundance. Therefore, I also present an overview of the methods, such as searching for signs of its presence, capture-recapture, predator : prey biomass ratios, photographic-capture rate and genetic analyses, used for estimating the abundance of snow leopard in different studies and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.