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The snow leopard is a highly charismatic megafauna that elicits admiration, concern and donations from individuals and NGOs in the West. In its home territories, however, it is a threat to local communities' livestock and a potential source of income for its pelt and parts. Conservation and study are further challenged by its range; snow leopards t...
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Livestock depredation by large carnivores in the South
Gobi, Mongolia
Abstract
Context. Livestock depredation is a major conservation challenge around the world, causing considerable economical
losses to pastoral communities and often result in retaliatory killing. In Mongolia, livestock depredation rates are thought
to be increasing due to chang...
Context. Livestock depredation is a major conservation challenge around the world, causing considerable economical losses to pastoral communities and often result in retaliatory killing. In Mongolia, livestock depredation rates are thought to be increasing due to changes in pastoral practices and the transformation of wild habitats into pasture lan...
Citations
... Studies of tigers and snow leopards Panthera uncia have led to transboundary research and conservation efforts between India and China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh (Ministry of External Affairs, 2011;Chanchani et al., 2014;Lewis and Songster, 2016;Thapa et al., 2017). Studies of leopard ecology in human-use landscapes aided the formulation of national guidelines on human-leopard conflict mitigation (Athreya et al., 2011;Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2011). ...
Substantial research and conservation resources are invested towards studying, protecting, and managing carnivore populations, globally. But scholarly investigations that link the outcomes of ecological research and their applications are not commonplace. Such syntheses can have implications for large predator management and human well-being. India holds strategic importance for carnivore conservation and management, supporting 60 species (including two sub-species), at relatively high densities. Reviewing all carnivore studies published in post-independence India (1947-2020), we investigate the academic impacts of published journal articles, and the role of institutions and collaborative research. We then present an analysis of the thematic patterns, trends, and biases in carnivore research. Using multiple case studies, we discuss the pertinence of ecological research in shaping litigation, policy, and conservation, while also deliberating on the facilitative role of funding and bureaucracy. Despite their purported charisma, not all carnivores benefited from extensive ecological studies, nor did conservation policy adequately draw from available scientific information; research studies were skewed towards large felids, and litigation/policies were overwhelmingly shaped by one species, the Bengal tiger Pan-thera tigris. We argue for reorienting current research efforts through increased focus on lesser-known species, adopting best practices in socio-ecological studies, widening the ambit of interdisciplinary work, democratizing carnivore science through partnerships, and enhancing synergy between carnivore researchers and research groups. Considered together, we believe this paper can serve as a guide for planning future research, for amplifying the overall profile of carnivore conservation science, and may be adapted across tropical countries of the Global South.
... Various political, social, economic, and ecological challenges have placed severe stress on snow leopards in the high-altitude Asian regions and have destabilized and fragmented their natural habitats. The multitude of factors include political boundaries and the associated fencing, climate change, transboundary infrastructure development, encroachment of agriculture and human settlements into the habitats of carnivores and their prey species, human-snow leopard conflict, and illegal trade in snow leopard skin and bones [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. The political fragmentation of the habitat, however, prevents the adoption of an integrated transboundary landscape approach to handle the issue of integrated habitat conservation and can be seen as the overarching phenomenon that has bearing on all the other factors and their mitigation. ...
... The challenges to mitigating the vulnerabilities of the transboundary snow leopard landscapes include land use and cover changes [21], habitat degradation [22,23], climate change [24,25], human-snow leopard conflict [1,26,27], political inefficiency [16], and border fencing [17]. The conservation policies are only effective if they incorporate ecological and social mechanisms that can positively impact the socio-ecological systems [28,29]. ...
... The snow leopard landscape spans international borders and includes some of the world's most disputed borders, including the Line of Control (LOC) between Pakistan and India and between India and China [16,31]. The closure or fencing of the international borders creates many problems for the snow leopards and their prey species [16,32], reducing food, water, and mating potential, thus leading to declining populations [31]. ...
Citation: Sultan, H.; Rashid, W.; Shi, J.; Rahim, I.u.; Nafees, M.; Bohnett, E.; Rashid, S.; Khan, M.T.; Shah, I.A.; Han, H.; et al. Horizon Scan of Transboundary Concerns Impacting Snow Leopard Landscapes in Asia. Land 2022, 11, 248. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11020248
... Although news tickers today are dominated by stories of tense geopolitical machinations, instances of China−India scientific cooperation and collaboration nonetheless persist. Much as in the case of Sahni and Hsü, the object of such research sometimes transcends contemporary politics (Lewis and Songster 2016). On occasion, it also transcends the earth, shifting our collective gaze toward the firmament. ...
This paper uses the decade-long collaboration between the Indian paleobotanist Birbal Sahni (1891–1949) and his Chinese doctoral student Hsü Jen (Xu Ren 徐仁, 1910–1992) to offer a connected history of mid-twentieth century scientific activity in China and India. Possibly the first Chinese scientist to earn a PhD from an Indian university (Lucknow, 1946), Hsü was certainly the first to be appointed to a faculty position in India. Sahni and Hsü's attempts to build Asian networks of scientific activity, characterized by the circulation of experts, scientific knowledge, and specimens, provide the grounds for considering a practice of Pan-Asianism. Such a formulation adds to existing work on the Pan-Asianist articulations of intellectual and political figures and urges for an expansion of how we understand scientific activity across China and India from the 1930s to the 1960s. In so doing, the paper makes two historiographical interventions. In the first instance, the collaboration presents an opportunity to move beyond the two dominant frames through which histories of science in China and India are studied: the nation state and Non-West/West binaries. Second, a focus on science widens the scope of China–India history, a field dominated by research on cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic topics.
... Seizures and observations from the two seven-year periods presented in the report ( -2009( -June 2016) are compared to two previous periods of equivalent length (1989-1995 and 1996-2002), for a total of four quarters. For the first two quarters, the main sources are reports on illegal trade in Snow Leopards by TRAFFIC (Theile, 2003) and Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU) (Dexel, 2002), both of which compiled cases from numerous sources as well as undertaking primary research. ...
