Beijing - A snow leopard conservation group on Monday said it planned to launch a major study in Mongolia that is designed to contribute to future strategies for protecting the endangered animal. The Snow Leopard Trust has agreed to cooperate with the Mongolian government and several other conservation groups in the initial 10-year study, using advanced technology such as remote cameras and genetic monitoring.
"Although there have been several valuable studies of the species to date, most were short-term, or at most four or five years in duration, and such short-term efforts simply cannot provide the understanding we need to conserve these cats," Tom McCarthy, the trust's conservation director, said in statement.
Habitat loss and poaching have reduced the population of wild snow leopards to an estimated 3,500 to 7,000 in about a dozen central and southern Asian nations.
Mongolia was chosen for the new study because it has some 1,000 snow leopards in the wild, the second largest population after China, and hosts existing conservation programmes involving more than 400 herder families in the remote Altai mountains.
The statement quoted George Schaller, a snow leopard expert from the Wildlife Conservation Society, as saying the new study was an "invaluable effort" that could prove as important to the animal's future as earlier studies of lions, tigers and their prey.
The trust also plans to take it first group of paying volunteers to help track snow leopards in western Mongolia this summer, it said on its website, www.snowleopard.org.
