For Cambodia’s last remaining Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri), extinction could be just around the corner, a new study has found. The only breeding population of this leopard subspecies in Cambodia is believed to occur within a large protected area complex in a part of the country called the Eastern Plains Landscape (EPL). But in just five years, leopard density within one protected area in the EPL has fallen from about three leopards per 100 square kilometers (39 square miles) in 2009 to one leopard per 100 square kilometers in 2014, a team of scientists found. This is one of the lowest densities of leopards reported in Asia, researchers write in the recent study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal. “The low density means that this population of Indochinese leopard has a high risk of extirpation in the near future, unless effective conservation action is taken immediately,” said lead author Susana Rostro-García, a postdoctoral researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the University of Oxford, U.K. This decline is especially worrying because the Indochinese leopard has already been wiped out from 94 percent of its former range. “This population in eastern Cambodia is the last remaining breeding population within a huge region spanning southeastern China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam,” said co-author Jan F. Kamler, Southeast Asia leopard program coordinator for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. “So it’s critically important to try and save this unique population before it goes extinct.” An Indochinese leopard passes a camera trap…
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