Ladakh holds India's largest snow leopard population, the national assessment finds

Background

The Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) Programme is the first-ever scientific exercise that reports a snow leopard population of 718 individuals in India. The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) is the National Coordinator for the exercise, which was carried out with the support of all snow leopard range states and two conservation partners, the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru and WWF-India. It covered approximately 120,000 sq km of crucial snow leopard habitat across the trans-Himalayan region, including the union territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir and the states of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, and was conducted from 2019 to 2023. The estimated populations are Ladakh (477), Uttarakhand (124), Himachal Pradesh (51), Arunachal Pradesh (36), Sikkim (21) and Jammu and Kashmir (9) — Ladakh's figure being by far the largest. Field effort included 13,450 km of trails surveyed for snow leopard signs and camera traps deployed at 1,971 locations for 180,000 trap nights, and a total of 241 unique snow leopards were photographed. Snow leopard occupancy was recorded in 93,392 sq km, with an estimated presence in 100,841 sq km, and the report proposes a dedicated Snow Leopard Cell at WII under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.