Cheetahs must be listed as 'endangered', say scientists

New York, Dec 13: With cheetah population in southern Africa found to be 11 per cent smaller than recent estimates, an intertiol team of scientists has called for uplisting the cats’ conservation status from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the Intertiol Union for Conservation of ture (IUCN) Red List. Populations of cheetahs in southern Africa have declined as farming and other human activities push deeper into the free-roaming cats’ range, said the study published in the jourl PeerJ.

Fewer than 3,600 adult cheetahs remain in the region, the researchers found. This new assessment is 11 per cent lower than the IUCN’s most recent population estimate in 2015, adding urgency to calls from scientists to uplist the cheetahs’ conservation status.

To conduct the study, the researchers mapped and alysed more than two million collared cheetah observations made between 2010 and 2016 across 789,700 square kilometres of open grasslands in mibia, Botswa, South Africa and Zimbabwe. (IANS)

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