After four years of survey, India’s snow leopard count put at 718
India has an estimated 718 snow leopards in the wild, according to a firstofits kind, fouryearlong estimation exercise, the results of which were made public on Tuesday.
The snow leopard is known to be an elusive cat and located in mountainous terrain that is hard to access, and the exercise for the first time marks a base threshold for the animal’s numbers in India.
The highest number of cats was estimated to be in Ladakh (477), followed by Uttarakhand (124), Himachal Pradesh (51), Arunachal Pradesh (36), Sikkim (21), and Jammu and Kashmir (nine). The current estimate puts the number of Indian snow leopards between 10% and 15% of the global population.
The exercise involved setting up cameras, or camera traps, in 1,971 locations and surveying 13,450 km of trails which teams surveyed for recording signs of snow leopards such as scat, hair and other body markers. Much like the approach used in surveys to estimate tiger numbers, the States conducted the surveys and the Dehradunbased Wildlife Institute of India, an autonomous body of the Union Environment Ministry, used software and statistical methods to estimate the number of individual cats that are present but not caught on camera and combined them with those caught on camera.
“Essentially we use a similar statistical approach to that being used in the tiger surveys for the past 20 years. It’s a rigorously tested equation and not dependent on guesswork,” V.B. Mathur, former head of the WII, involved in the study, told The Hindu.
“Over the years, technology and statistics has improved leading to better estimates. What we now have is a good, scientifically established baseline that will be a reference for future surveys,” he added.
The Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) began in 2019 and involves the World Wide Fund for NatureIndia and the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru, along with the WII.
The snow leopard is classified as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and faces threats from freeranging dogs, humanwildlife conflicts, and poaching.