Securing India's snow leopards: Status, threats, and conservation

India has a rich natural history record from the Himalaya spanning over a century. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing knowledge on snow leopard, especially from the more recent studies. A knowledge gap analysis in 2016 had revealed that barely 4% of its range was well studied, although snow leopards occur pervasively across ca. 100,350 km2 in the Indian Himalaya. This coverage has more than doubled by 2021, while close to a third of the range that had no information has now been reduced to just 5%. Major contributors to this improvement are the institutional research efforts as well as a national snow leopard population assessment initiated by the central Ministry under which over 70% of the range is being covered by occupancy surveys, followed by population assessments using camera trapping and genetic analyses of scats. Threats vary regionally, but livestock grazing by migratory herders and recent developmental pressures appear to be the most serious conservation issues threatening snow leopard and other wildlife in snow leopard range. Given the pervasive snow leopard occurrence and human pressures, the consensus and national strategy is to formulate and implement knowledge-based, participatory programs over large landscapes. In fact, this change is already in place with over 10 large, almost contiguous landscapes identified from Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, in the east to the Kashmir Valley in the west, under various programs such as the Project Snow Leopard, SECURE Himalaya, and the Man & Biosphere program.