Ongoing threats and the current status of snow leopard conservation in China

When working with widespread large carnivores, most conservation organizations can only perform direct conservation actions for a specific population, but the extinction risk of a species is evaluated at a global scale. Here, we aim to bridge this impact gap by assessing the work and opinions from many organizations. We combines knowledge from scientific literature with the observations of 24 front-line staff working at 18 Chinese snow leopard research and conservation organizations. Through attending two group-meetings and by filling in threat-scoring spreadsheets, we identified 21 threats and ranked them at both the national and provincial levels. The five main snow leopard distribution provinces are Qinghai, Tibet, Xinjiang, Sichuan and Gansu. Also, we analyzed 17 conservation actions conducted by these conservation organizations, as well as the threats these actions attempted to address. The top three threats in China are the insufficient capacity of local conservation departments (9.5 points), climate change (8.0 points), and the lack of conservation incentive among local communities (6.8 points), although large differences exist between provinces. There is currently no action being taken in response to climate change. Although some conservation actions have addressed the insufficient capacity of local conservation departments and the lack of conservation awareness in local communities, such as by building up the capacity of conservation areas and monitoring by communities, respectively, the spatial coverage of these actions is still far from sufficient.