Rawdatafiles for snow leopard population estimation

1. Effective management of charismatic large carnivores requires robust monitoring of their population at local, regional and global scales. While enormous progress has been made to estimate carnivore populations at local scales, estimates at regional and global scales remain elusive. In the first systematic effort at a large regional scale, we estimated the population of the elusive snow leopard Panthera uncia over an area of 26,112 km2 in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

2. We stratified the entire snow leopard habitat in Himachal Pradesh based on an occupancy survey. Subsequently, we conducted camera trapping surveys at 10 sites distributed proportionately, i.e., with similar coverage probability across the three strata. We conducted simulations to understand how unidentified captures could affect our model estimate. We also assessed populations of the primary wild ungulate prey of snow leopards – blue sheep Psuedois nayaur and Siberian ibex Capra sibirica.

3. Our results ...