Dr. Ivan Csiszar, Associate Research Scientist, with co-investigators Dr. Guoqing Sun and Tatiana Loboda were awarded a sub award from the University of Virginia. The project also includes collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The prime sponsor is NASA for this project entitled “Evaluation of habitat availability for large carnivores under a changing climate and disturbance regime: the Amur Tiger and Amur Leopard case study.”

The award is for over $322,000 for 3 years Northern Eurasia’s temperate and boreal forests have been experiencing impacts induced by climate change and the post-soviet period changes in economic practices. Due to their large spatial extent and remoteness, Russian forests are a stronghold for large carnivore preservation in the boreal zone. A crucial condition for larger carnivorous species’ well-being is the availability of large interconnected areas of suitable habitat necessary to support a minimum viable population of a given species. This project will evaluate the impact of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on endemic species richness inferred from the distribution of the Amur Tiger and Amur Leopard to create a basis for modeling activities aimed a predicting tiger distribution in the future.