Context

Wildlife specialists have for long faced challenges estimating the density of leopards in areas where some of the spotted cats are melanistic or black.

In news

Experts from three organisations, one of them Assam-based Aaranyak, have come up with a system that helps in properly estimating the leopard population in areas sustaining a mix of rosette and melanistic individuals.

Issue

• Melanistic leopards — commonly called black leopards or black panthers or ghongs (Assamese) — have been difficult to estimate as their rosettes are invisible.
• This problem is acute in the tropical and subtropical moist forests of South and Southeast Asia where the frequency of melanistic leopards is high and leopards also face the greatest threat.
• No precise estimates of leopard population could thus be done in protected areas and non-protected areas in India except on some occasions.

Solution

• The Spatial Mark-Resight (SMR) models applied by the scientists of Aaranyak, Panthera and World Wide Fund for Nature-India have provided a way of counting the melanistic leopards too.
• “In the SMR models, researchers borrow the capture history of the rosette leopards and apply the information on the melanistic leopards to estimate the entire population size of leopards.
• This is a significant analytical development that can help assess the population of leopards across a great part of the species range from where population estimates are scant.

Source: PIB