A record number of conservation projects working to protect the threatened Pallas’s cat have been awarded funding from the International Pallas’s Cat Conservation Alliance (PICA).
€50,000 has been given to five projects, based in the species’ native countries of Mongolia, Nepal and China.
PICA, a collaborative conservation project between Nordens Ark, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and Snow Leopard Trust, awards funds annually from its Small Grant Programme to researchers and organisations operating in the Pallas’s cat wild range.
Emma Nygren, PICA project manager, said:
“PICA’s small grants programme enables global projects to discover more about this elusive animal and the threats it faces in the wild.
“Without more information about these cats, we can’t deliver key conservation activities on the ground that are so important to restoring the species.
“For the very first time, we have been able to award a Chinese based project funding, potentially allowing us new insights into a population we’ve never previously been able to study at this level.
“This is hugely important for conserving such a wide-ranging species as the Pallas’s cat, whose distribution spans across 16 countries.”
The PICA Small Grant Programme is possible thanks to a conservation fund supported by a number of zoos around the world.
This collaboration is crucial to support research and conservation activity on the ground for Pallas’s cats.
Populations of Pallas’s cats across its expansive range are small, isolated and declining, with the species at risk of local or regional extinctions.
As one of the world’s least studied felines, the lack of knowledge limits the development of targeted conservation efforts for the species by projects like PICA and the zoos that support its work.
