WildCats Conservation Alliance

Background

WildCats grants funds to projects in five different countries in Asia to ensure tigers and Amur leopards are safe and thriving in the wild.
These include projects in:

• Thailand, for the critically endangered Indochinese tiger.
• Nepal, where the success story of increasing tiger numbers is driving the need to increase the focus on coexistence, conflict mitigation and habitat restoration.
• Sumatra, whereby they are funding conservation in a landscape that holds around one third of the remaining Sumatran tiger population.
• The Amur region. Across this transboundary landscape they are funding two large scale projects with WCS; these cover a range of support for national park staff through SMART training, providing equipment, population monitoring of both Amur leopards and tigers and community focused projects. The teams are collaborating with local villagers to reduce snares in the forests to protect big cats and their prey from poaching by funding and training community antipoaching teams; villages receive training to help householders avoid confrontations with big cats and what to do if a conflict situation arises.

Achievements and Objectives

WildCats Conservation Alliance aims to reduce the key threats to tigers and Amur leopards by addressing illegal wildlife trade, increasing the area that is protected by antipoaching activities, enabling community coexistence and mitigating conflict, helping to create safe and secure habitats.

Deepening the understanding of the population ecology of wild tigers and Amur leopards through population monitoring, wildlife health monitoring and other relevant research is important in the process of informing conservation actions.

This project also aims to create and sustain a cadre of experienced and knowledgeable in country tiger and leopard conservationists through a variety of capacity development approaches.

WildCats also aims to inspire key stakeholders to act for wild tiger and Amur leopard conservation through education and outreach efforts to encourage collaboration and participation in conservation.

2025 Update:

• A total of 117 community and park staff have been trained across a variety of conservation skills.
• 374 camera traps were deployed by the project teams in the first half of 2025.
• 12,630km of habitat was patrolled by ranger and community patrols.
• 112 signs of poaching and encroachment were detected, reported and disrupted, as well as 5 reports of human-tiger conflict responded to.
• 1,006 individuals living and working alongside tigers and Amur leopard have been reached by project teams to provide support and engagement.
• A Central Intelligence Database has been created to track wildlife trafficking and no active snare traps were found.