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Journalism of Courage
The Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) has estimated a population of 718 in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Carried out between 2019 and 2023, this study is a major leap in our understanding of the keystone species.
Snow leopards are believed to occupy around 1 lakh sq km of the higher Himalayan terrains in India. As recently as 2016, the cat’s status was unknown in as much as one-third of its range. This went well with the legend of the ‘ghost of the mountains’ built around the elusive cat’s mastery of stealth and camouflage.
But for this ‘ghost’ to have a future — and since the future of most species is increasingly determined by human actions — knowledge of the cat’s status across its range was necessary for framing the right policies. This was also a question of securing our future because the snow leopard’s habitat is where all major Himalayan rivers that sustain life across much of India spring to life.
Yet, a national effort to count snow leopards — colloquial for ‘studying abundance’ — across its range remained daunting on multiple counts.
The first and foremost on the list of obstacles is the unforgiving terrain snow leopards occupy. While the cold deserts of Ladakh and Spiti are their strongholds, snow leopards range all along the higher Himalayas above the tree line between the altitude of 10,500 to 17,000 feet. Much of this habitat is not accessible by motorable roads and its rarified air makes even routine fieldwork, such as locating suitable sites for placing camera traps, a test of endurance.
Analysing photos camera-trapped in the field poses the next challenge. Specialised software can identify unique individuals by comparing stripes or rosettes on both flanks from a pool of photographs. But unlike tigers, zebras or even leopards, snow leopards do not yield to artificial intelligence.
For long, researchers have grappled with the issue of misidentifying individual snow leopards “as their spot patterns may not be easily recognised when their thick fur gets ruffled or when their body is photographed at different angles.” To overcome this challenge, a global consensus of researchers recommended manual evaluation using at least three marking patterns to differentiate between individuals, and employing multiple independent analysts for identification.
The head and tail of a snow leopard provide the best reference points for identification. Some researchers have tried to position cameras strategically to capture the forehead region of snow leopards, as was done in Ladakh during the present SPAI exercise. But that requires multiple camera traps at each location and can stretch resources.
Given the methodological intricacies associated with precisely estimating snow leopard populations owing to their cryptic behaviour and the expansive, rugged nature of their habitats, notes the SPAI report, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) partnered with two NGOs — Nature Conservation Foundation and WWF-India — to prepare India’s snow leopard estimation protocol in 2019.
The groundwork was carried out in the next three years. In all, photographs collected from 1,971 camera trap locations led to the identification of 241 unique individuals which was extrapolated to an estimated population of 718 snow leopards in India.
In Ladakh, camera traps were placed in 956 locations covering 8,604 sq km for 120 to 180 days. Based on their distinctive forehead patterns, 126 unique adult individuals were identified from 10,789 images of snow leopards. The population was estimated to be 477 across 47,572 sq km.
In Jammu and Kashmir, only 9 unique individuals were identified by deploying 278 camera traps at 135 locations. Even after dropping four individuals due to poor image quality and unfavourable capture angles, notes SPAI, this data set fell short of providing a comprehensive estimate for the snow leopard population across 949 sq km.
In Himachal Pradesh, 44 unique individuals were identified from 187 photos captured across 284 camera trap locations, leading to an estimated population of 51 across 25,000 sq km was extrapolated. From 41 unique individuals identified from 396 snow leopard photos, Uttarakhand estimated a population of 124 occupying 12,768 sq km.
In the eastern Himalayas, Arunachal Pradesh estimated a population of 36 across 14,156 sq km from 8 unique snow leopards identified from 115 camera trap locations. In Sikkim, 14 unique individuals were identified from 64 snow leopard photos captured from 99 camera trap locations. The estimated population was 21 snow leopards across 400 sq km.
In the 1980s, a guesstimate of a global population of 4,000–7,500 snow leopards cited 400–700 individuals in India. In the 1990s, another guesstimate put 200-600 snow leopards in India out of a global count of 3,020-5,390. In 2016, India’s leading snow leopard researchers came together to put the national estimate at 516 (238-1039).
The present count of 718 (594-825) is consistent with the trend and suggests overall population stability. Yet, this is just the beginning of understanding the elusive species, its dispersal and competitive land use patterns and mortality trends at a landscape level.
Infrastructure development, particularly highways and hydropower projects, is causing a rapid influx of labourer camps in the higher Himalayas who often depend on scarce natural resources for fuel and food. Such migrations, along with a boom in tourism in snow leopard areas, have also led to garbage mismanagement which, in turn, is fuelling an explosion in the free-ranging dog population that competes with snow leopards.
While climate change is likely to determine the snow leopard’s fate in the long term, mitigating the impact of such rapid demographic changes on the species is essential to secure its immediate future.
