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As Nepal counts its snow leopards, even the best estimate is still a guess

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KATHMANDU — Scientists and government officials have embarked on the uphill task of coming up with a number, or even just a range, for the population of snow leopards in the Himalayan country. To do so, they’re having to rely on several fragmented studies carried out during different periods of time in different landscapes across the country. The undertaking is Nepal’s commitment to the Population Assessment of the World’s Snow Leopards program, or PAWS. The program was adopted in 2019 by 12 countries that host populations of snow leopards (Panthera uncia) and is part of the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP). “Previous snow leopard population studies in Nepal as well as many other countries often faced limitations due to sampling bias, with smaller, high-density areas leading to inflated population estimates,” said Rinzin Phunjok Lama, a snow leopard researcher who’s on the newly formed government committee to conduct the count. Because the range countries hadn’t agreed on a standardized approach, it became challenging to compare and aggregate data across regions before PAWS was rolled out. In the context of Nepal, pioneering telemetry work by researcher Rodney Jackson and his team in the late 1980s and early ’90s form the bedrock of population estimates within the country. They first estimated the snow leopard population in Nepal to be around 150-300 in 1979 and later revised the number up to 350-500 individuals based on a computerized habitat suitability model. In 2009, researchers from WWF and the Department of National Parks…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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